I am literally buried in tote sorting, so I am taking the day off from the link roundup and presenting you with an open thread instead! (This is your head’s up that I’m putting the new totes up on Wednesday morning at 9am Eastern Time.)
This particular open thread is in honour of my lovely stepmother Amanda (or “New Mommy,” as I call her) who beat cancer this year and just got her port taken out, and reads The Toast every day.
Yay! Beat cancer is the best!!! 🎉
Time to yell about your favorite books! Doesn’t matter if they’re of quality or not, doesn’t matter if anyone else likes them. What do you love to read and what do those books make you feel?
I’m a just-about-grown adult who still adores Dealing With Dragons and will prob be rereading it until I die because it’s just so sensible. All the characters are practical and the magic has reasonable limits, and the omniscient narration somehow still manages to feel as if it’s being told by a brisk middle-aged lady of means who always knows which spell to cast and where to seat a dozen dragons at afternoon tea.
I want to yell about Nalini Singh. I love her so much but have conflicted feelings about her latest psy/changling book!
Please do yell! I also love her and I haven’t talked to anyone else who’s read the latest book, would love to hear your thoughts!
There were so many babies!! I knew it was a transitional book but it was like reading 15 treacley epilogues with a little bit of an interesting story running through (the Sea-changling bit) Everyone is happy and in love and that’s fine cause they are romance novels and all but ergghhh too much. I liked the Vasic and Ivy bits though and I want to see more of the “Forgotten” contingent.
Oh God yes far too many babies, everybody was having babies or thinking of having babies except the ones who’d recently adopted other kids. Too many kids! I’m a little sick of the wolves and the leopards tbh… More Arrows, more Forgotten, more humans, more sea-changelings!! Fortunately that seems to be where the next arc is headed.
Yes! Even characters that had previously said no kids (Looking at you Faith) were all like wellllllll. Sea Changlings are really interesting so far, and I love me some Arrows. When does the guy in the under sea station get his book, she keeps dropping hints about him and it’s making me nutty.
Apparently it will be a novella in the collection coming out in August!
Hooray!
Going off on a tangent to woe about the lack of any new Meljean Brook for quite some time. She teased us with a Conan-esque barbarian novella that was really good! I want more. Will not even comment on the long promised Blacksmith book for fear of jinxing it somehow
I have a soft spot for multi-generational family sagas. Anything with lady scientists (The Signature of All Things is an all-time favorite). Fantasy with an interesting twist on the magic system (Mistborn!). I’m getting into sci-fi (hard and more traditional). It’s hard to put my finger on what they make me feel. They just let me FEEL and escape and dream and see a whole world that I can’t begin to imagine. That’s just generally why I love reading.
I have to second that Mistborn is amazing! Actually, almost all of Sanderson’s work is. I basically went down the rabbit hole of his books two years ago and never came back out again.
I didn’t expect to love Sanderson as much as I did. Though I’ve been trying to pace myself on his books. I’ve read all of Mistborn, but I haven’t started the Stormlight Archive yet. The first one’s sitting on my shelf, though.
Mistborn is so great. I’ve just torn through numbers 5 and 6 in the past couple weeks. Shadows of Self was amazing, but I ended up really angry at Bands of Mourning.
Lady scientists! I feel like I have been reading a lot of “science fiction” lately and loving it. Got Lab Girl on hold at the library right now, which I hear is an amazing memoir.
You are in for a treat! It’s such a good discussion of science and friendship and mental health.
Yes. Sci-fi is often good for – even when dealing with rough or complicated issues – never feeling like “work” in the way some books do.
An Experiment in Love! I think that was the first book I ever read in class (in college) that I related to on a visceral level. After years of reading about men (or female characters written by men) and their issues it was so amazing to finally have a character that was worried about the same things I was. Sex! Abortion! Birth control! What if I’m not as smart as I think?!
It also made me understand how important representation was, because everyone deserves to have that moment of “it’s not just me, someone else out there knows what I am feeling” that I had. Write (and teach!) more diverse books!
Thanks to the Toasties, I just read Dealing with Dragons for the first time this month. Excellent pick.
Meanwhile, I’m gearing myself up for a re-listen of Code Name Verity, because apparently I enjoy both destroying myself and the anticipation of destroying myself?
Code Name Verity was so good, I’m afraid to reread it and somehow spoil the magic of it.
I’ve reread it a couple of times, it holds up!
Listen to the audiobook! It’s like a totally different and heartbreaking experience.
Good to know, I always need new audiobooks. And I love crying while hiking?
I downloaded the audiobook when it was free a couple summers ago through that one YA New/Old Audiobook program (god help me I can’t for the life of me remember what the site is, but it’s a themed pairing and a new one every week all summer), and I’ve been waiting for the perfect time to listen. It isn’t exactly a book you can just pop in on a bike ride or on the drive to work. Reading the paper book was hard enough to pause so I could drive or work!
Audiobook Sync
though I discovered that listening to Code Name Verity while driving was even more dangerous (due to sobs) than listening to Me Talk Pretty One Day while driving (due to guffaws)
Fun Fact: If you watch the Masterpiece show Grantchester (and if not, why not, dude is yum), his horrible swank unrequited love interest is one of the Code Name Verity narrators.
I’m just not up for being harrowed again! But I think maybe our local toastie bookgroup is doing it later this year.
So good. Have you also read the companion/sequel Rose Under Fire? It is also so good but even sadder, if that’s possible.
Yeah, I like it a ton, too, but Verity will always hold top place in my heart.
If you liked Rose Under Fire and want to know a little bit more about the history of the camp it’s set in as well as the Polish “rabbits” who were experimented on, might I suggest If This is a Woman (I think the U.S. edition is just called Ravensbruck) by Sarah Helm? It’s a stunning read, in every sense of the word. I found parts of it hard to get through just from the sheer horror, but I learned about so many brave and amazing women.
Thanks – I added it to my hold list
I found Rose much harder to read.
oh my gosh Rose wrecked me.
That was the month I accidentally read *two* books about Ravensbruck. Never again.
The first time I listened to Code Name Verity, the voice in my head read things in a Scottish accent for a week.
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson (the author of the Moomin books).
It is beautiful and heartbreaking and human and really, the toastiest of books, just listen to the Wikipedia summary:
“An elderly woman and her six-year-old granddaughter Sophia spend a summer together on a tiny island in the gulf of Finland exploring, talking about life, nature, everything but their feelings about Sophia’s mother’s death and their love for one another.”
I deeply deeply love The Secret History. I read it for the first time in the fall of my sophomore year of college and it made me desperately want to be a Classics major, even though that is the opposite message one should take away from that book. It’s just so well written! No one is a good person! They’re all vaguely ridiculous in the way that rich college students who don’t understand consequences are ridiculous! That book makes me feel like I’m vaguely drunk and it’s raining outside, and everything is slow and a little lonely. It’s one of my favorite book-engendered atmospheres.
I read The Secret History thanks to Nicole! https://theawl.com/the-secret-history-i-know-what…
I had not read that article until now and I love every word of it. “Forbidden, nerdy bitch goddess” is the best way to describe that book.
As someone who went to a small college in Vermont I find the amount of running around outside they do exhausting. Like, it is always freezing there and it is uphill in every direction. I had to reread some scenes because I was too busy thinking about how in shape they must all have been.
But it was a really, really good book.
Right? Every so often I have stop and be like “Guys, all you do is lay around, translate, and drink a lot how do you move so quickly? What is your workout secret? I do less of all those things and I am not as fleet of foot as you.”
I’m pretty sure there’s an unpublished prequel called “The Secret Workout”.
I can never decide if I love Secret History (as a lover of boarding school/rich kid problems books) or absolutely hate it because everything and everyone is awful.
I love/hate that book so much too! Everybody is terrible and yet I love reading about them. I don’t know why.
I do thank the stars I didn’t discover that book in my teens because I might have ended up being an insufferable classicist, rather than just an insufferable art historian, which is quite bad enough.
I read it and then applied to do Classics at Oxford, which I think is an excellent example of why I can’t be trusted to watch adverts.
The only Donna Tartt book I’ve read was the Goldfinch and it had a similar thing going on. The atmosphere was really absorbing and the whole story felt not entirely of this world, which I love, but so many terrible things happened. I haven’t brought myself to read another of her books but I want to.
I love The Secret History so much, I have lost count of the number of people I have pushed to read it.
Should I give it another chance? I started it, and was so annoyed with a) the narrator’s woe-is-me pretension when his life seemed basically fine and b) the complete lack of female characters other than a single one who is only seen through the eyes of the male narrator.
Hm. It’s definitely a book that deconstructs both Richard’s pretension as bullshit and how he holds up Camilla, the one female character, to this pedestal that she really doesn’t deserve or want. But the fact remains that it starts off with that structure in place, so it’s entirely up to you and your personal tastes as to how much you can stomach it.
Love it and was just coming here to yell about it. I wanted to learn Greek really badly for quite a while after I read it; unfortunately I had already done four semesters of Russian and was not about to start that nonsense again.
In my senior year of college I compromised and took Latin, which I genuinely enjoyed, but the entire time I had a weird, vaguely Henry-lite voice in my head hissing “THIS ISN’T HOMER HOW DARE YOU BETRAY THE AESTHETIC”
I think ‘sophomore year of college’ is the perfect time to read that book–mainly because I did as well and then promptly bought a swoopy coat like Francis’, signed up for fencing, and took one disastrous semester of Latin. It was the best (and also the worst, because I was insufferable).
yeah, I have a feeling it would not have worked for me nearly as much 5 years later. (I mean it does NOW, but there’s a nostalgia factor.) Whereas I had no time for those kids in The Magicians at all.
yes! I love it, too for those kinds of reasons. Now I feel I sort of have the kind of attachment I do to certain books from my childhood, because there are books with similar “problems” I have low tolerance for, but here I hang on to every lavish description and woeful monologue and general terrible peopleness and I’m all in.
Howl’s Moving Castle! I want Diana Wynne Jones to be as adored as she deserves! But I should really probably bite the bullet and force my way through Fire and Hemlock right? It’s the one book of hers I can’t seem to get into.
I adore Fire and Hemlock with all my heart, but I understand eating to throw it against a wall. Don’t sweat it, I say. Read Reflections if you haven’t already. It’s a book of her essays about writing and her life, and everyone who has ever written five words in a row should read it.
I shall give that a try!
Reflections also contains an essay about Fire and Hemlock that sort of…explains the plot as I understand it. If you do ever finish that book I also recommend this essay. It has a second part I can’t find at the moment, but it exists (and if you want it and can’t find it I’m pretty sure I saved the whole thing somewhere so I could read it again). It’s an interesting analysis of the book and agrees with what DWJ herself wrote about the book and it’s construction.
Yes, fire and hemlock is one of those ones where it really helps to have a previous understanding of some of the source material she’s working with, like the ballad of tam lin or thomas the rhymer. If you already know their structure and love them it’s a lot easier to follow the story. imho it’s incredibly rewarding, especially as a child who was always hoping to find fairies around every corner.
I need to read more Diana Wynne Jones. I’ve read all the books in the Howl series plus the Chronicles of Chrestomanci but that’s it. What should I read next?
The Dark Lord of Derkholm and its sequel The Year of the Griffin! So funny. Kinda based on her nonfiction The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. Much skewering of fantasy tropes.
Dark Lord of Derkholm is SO GOOD, I love the way it sends up every fantasy trope while also having a real story of its own
DWJ has some awesome standalones:
Dogsbody (if you like a) stars, b) dogs, c) really well done child’s-eye perspective on the Troubles)
Homeward Bounders (if you like the contemplation of time and essential alienation at the heart of the human condition made horrific via the metaphor of cosmic D&D games)
Hexwood (if you like cascading multiple universes and hypothetical scenarios played out simultaneously)
Also Deep Secret (multiverse wizard has to try to find his successor and prevented a multiverse-spanning empire from collapsing in the middle of ComiCon)
Hah! I commented before reading yours and you and I have rec’d a very similar list (I didn’t like Homeward Bounders or Hexwood as a kid, but my sister tells me Hexwood at least reads better as an adult so I am planning to try that one again)
Homeward Bounders was one of the few books as a kid that both terrified me and that I love. I haven’t read it in a while though.
I recently reread Homeward Bounders and it absolutely holds up as an adult. It deals with loneliness and losing place you call home, which if anything is more heartbreaking as an adult than as a kid.
I just read Deep Secret this weekend! Somehow the cover edition I saw had not appealed to me (idk, it had a goofy looking centaur) and then someone mentioned it in the Slack I think and I loved it.
Will have to try those! I know I read The Merlin Conspiracy and was comparatively meh, but those sound good.
If you want to see how she writes adult books (she wrote two) try Deep Secret! I read that book for the first time last year and I loved it. Then you can read its companion novel The Merlin Conspiracy. Which is for kids, but takes place in the same universe.
If you love dogs, read Dogsbody. I read it for the first time a couple years ago and it unseated Howl for fave DWJ (Howl held that spot for a good decade).
You should also read Black Maria if you love terrifying covens of old women
“if”
heh
I really liked her “Unexpected Magic” collected stories, too.
I love DWJ. I love the Tam Lin story. Fire and Hemlock still doesn’t make sense to me.
Also: I love DWJ and Howl’s Moving Castle. I love Miyazaki. I somehow just couldn’t deal with the changes made for the Miyazaki HWC.
I mentioned this below, but DWJ has written an essay which explains Fire and Hemlock. It’s in Reflections. Plus there’s an essay I found online after I read the book and wanted to see if someone on the internet could explain it to me. Someone in the comments said she showed it to DWJ and the author of the essay has the right idea. There’s a part two that I can’t find, but I’m pretty sure I saved it somewhere so if you want it let me know!
Yeah, the Miyazaki version seemed to me to be almost in-name-only, especially after the beginning.
Chrestomanci! Christopher Chant is my kind of man, and is in the continuum of my book crushes. These include Lord Peter Wimsey, Antryg Windrose, Sherlock Holmes, Justin Alistair (Duke of Avon in These Old Shades), and pretty much all the mens in Patricia Veryan’s novels. Oh! Almost forgot Willie Garvin, Modesty Blaise’s partner.
OH my god Fire and Hemlock forged large parts of my personality. I read it when I was a kid and didn’t understand most of it, then as a teen, then as an adult. It is in my soul now. I can’t even look at hemlock on the side of the road without thinking of it.
Fire and Hemlock took me awhile, just structurally. (In a way I felt like it almost recreated the confusion Polly has about what’s real and what’s happened, but it isn’t necessarily an easy read of it.)
One of my favourite ‘books’ is The Least of All Possible Mistakes by rageprufrock (Sherlock fic on A03)
I know we’ve fangirled about it before, bit still….
This is the book I go to when my heart is breaking and I need solace and to make sense of the world again.
oh mannnn I am super overdue for a re-re-re-re-re-re-re-read of that, thank you for the reminder.
I have it saved on my phone, just in case I need something to read.
Same.
Yup. It’s the first thing that gets loaded onto a new ereader.
That is EXACTLY what I read when my heart is breaking and I need solace. Are we twins??
One of my all-time faves is A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver, and every few years I reread it and desire to be as badass as Eleanor of Aquitaine.
I need to reread this. It is the only reason I have any knowledge of the British monarchy at that time.
I love E. L. Koenigsburg but I’ve still never read this one. Needs to go on the list, yes thank you for reminding me.
Oh my gosh yes.
Actually, anything by E.L. Koningsburg is a good re-read for me. I was so proud I teared up when one of the nieces said she had read From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler thanks to the copy I gifted her older sister a few years back and she loved it so. She left my house this summer with my childhood copies of A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver and The View From Saturday.
SO good.
Me too! I loved this one as a preteen–I checked it out from the library multiple times–and I was so delighted to reread it a few years ago and see that it still held up as a Very Good Book.
(And I’ve always wanted to read more fiction or nonfiction about Eleanor of Aquitaine, if you or anyone else has any recommendations!)
I haven’t yet read this, but Marion Meade did a biography of her. Also, she will be the subject of an upcoming History Chicks podcast! They always end with a list of books, articles, and movies to reference.
Oh, awesome! Looking forward to that. And having a new podcast to devour might make the end of the Toast a little less difficult, thank you.
I got this one at a library book sale in 2010 and every summer vacation, I think “ah, time to read!” and i never do. I’d be ashamed of myself but my stack of books waiting to be read that I already own is 2x as tall as me, and more keep arriving.
Does anyone else deeply love A.S. Byatt’s “The Children’s Book?” It doesn’t really have much Plot, but the world-interlacing is just so dear and lovely and rich that I have read it about five times.
Yes, I loved that book! I was so sad when I finished it; I really didn’t want to leave that world. I’d have been perfectly happy if it had meandered along for another 900 pages.
I recently re-read the Dealing with Dragons series and YES, SAME, I was just so happy. And you’re 100% right about the narrator haha.
I also just re-re-re-re-read all of Tamora Pierce’s books (Tortall and Emelan) and just AHHHH they will always be my happy place.
Did you follow the Mark Reads take on them? If not, check it out, for it is a joy and a delight.
Mark is the best, and sometimes I put on his Reads videos while I’m doing dishes. I especially like the Ella Enchanted and Dealing with Dragons ones. 😀 (Though I’m super excited for when he gets to Monstrous Regiment!)
Me too! When I have a lot of cooking or cleaning to do, I put on his Reads videos and get so much done! (Also super super excited for Monstrous Regiment!)
He did the Dealing with Dragons Series??
I love Swamplandia! so much.
I liked it too, right up until the ending. How did you feel about that? I was very conflicted.
Ugh the ending made me so mad. How did you all feel about that?
Once I got to that point it felt like it was very obvious that it was going to happen, but also I’d spent so much time worried it would without it happening yet that I’d started to feel in the clear. Nope.
I’ll tout “House of the Spirits” by Isabel Allende for eternity. And the reason I started reading her? John Taylor of Duran Duran said it was his favorite book in the tour program for the ’87 Duran Duran tour.
He can play bass like a boss AND make decent book recs. What’s not to love, really?
I LOVE that book. I read it every couple of years and each time I love it anew.
I’m pretty sure my strong desire to visit Chile was due to Isabelle Allende. I have Paula sitting on my desk right now.
Having just graduated from my degree, I am remembering that I love to read again!! I read all of Wide Sargasso Sea in one weekend (God what a sad sad book). I am almost done reading Between the World and Me, which is intense and challenging and inspiring. I am in the middle of God’s Secretaries, which is about the creation of the King James Bible and totally fun and engaging. I started Middlemarch and that has been good but I have to read it in small chunks. YAY READING! On my porch, on my couch, with wine or beer and my cat next to meeeeee.
My faves? The ones I read once and love forever or the ones I read over and over? The Plague helped me form my life’s philosophy. Wild helped me to understand that even if I have screwed up, I can try again. Julie and Julia helps me laugh when I feel like crap. The Dark Tower series takes me to another world. Anne of Green Gables feels kind of like home and yet alien at the same time. Skin is a glorious collection of essays by writer Dorothy Allison who faces trauma and loss and still manages to stake out a place at the table that doesn’t want her. Persuasion and The Blue Castle helped me to not give up on love when it seemed everyone else had gotten hitched and settled down, and I was single in my late 20s feeling like damaged goods thanks to an evil ex boyfriend. Lots more…
Dealing with Dragons, plus sequels, make me so very happy.
I can’t choose a favorite, but books I love and would yell about:
The Dark is Rising series.
Persuasion, which is even better than Pride and Prejudice.
The Vorkosigan series.
Rivers of London series.
The Dark is Rising. <3
Yay, a fellow Vorkosigan van. Have you read Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen yet? I haven’t – for some reason I feel this urge to save it for when I really need it.
I have not, and I actually haven’t yet read Cryoburn. I can’t make myself do it.
I have! It was delightful and I enjoyed it very much, though it feels very different than a lot of the other Vorkosigan novels. This is in part because Cordelia is so very competent at this point in her life that problems that would be plot points in other Vorkosigan novels are just quietly dealt with and barely make a ripple. I’ve heard some disappointment from people who were looking for a more space-adventure-driven Vorkosigan novel, but I thought it was lovely.
This is exactly how I felt about it. I was happy she didn’t do another space-adventure-driven one because Cryoburn was sort of that and it…didn’t really work for me? It felt like Miles had just outgrown the kind of plot he was stuck in. I mean, I think the book was aware of that too on some level, but…yeah, at this point basically all the main characters are level 20 and what else can we do with them?
ETA that’s why Gentleman Jole worked for me even though it was really different – because it was really different. I greatly enjoyed it!
I read it. No spoilers or anything, but I would say it’s not going to rock your world so much that you need to keep it in a glass case. its more like when you read a book and then the last chapter is just kind of a gentle epilogue, thats what it was to me, just a sort of easy non demanding, non-heartbreaking read. In fact if you sit on it for a long time when you read it it’s going to be like, “was that it?!” A civil campaign is always going to be my go-to comfort vorkosigan book.
100% agreed on Persuasion. I mean, come on, “You pierce my soul”? Doesn’t get any better.
Persuasion is the best Austen and I will throw anyone who says otherwise off the Cobb
Arglefraster!
Anything by Nancy Mitford and Christopher Isherwood.
Also JG Ballard.
I love JG Ballard’s short stories, but find myself grinding to a halt when I’ve tried any of his novels – when I can’t remember which character is which (of a small cast), the characterisation isn’t working for me.
The Witch Family! It may be a children’s book, but it’s my comfort re-read even as I’m approaching middle age. Witches and mermaids and friendship and being brave and different.
Oh I loved this book when I was younger. Haven’t read it in ages – I should dig it up.
Watership Down! A motley group becoming a family who trust each other with their lives! Adventure! Cunning tricks! The power and importance of stories!
It also has one of the best examples of a certain perfect moment in books that’s really hard to describe…If there’s a word or phrase for this, let me know. There’s a moment in the story when all hope seems lost, and then something happens–and in just a few sentences, a ton of unrelated pieces of the story, scattered throughout the book, suddenly come together, like one of those optical illusions when you suddenly see the shape formed by a bunch of dots. And you know exactly how the characters will make it, but they’re not there *yet,* so you’re still reading pages frantically, hanging on to every word. All the while wondering how on earth the author managed to pull it off.
Always always. It’s one of my absolute favorites.
(“But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning.” GAH! so good.)
Watership Down! My dad read it to me when I was seven and it’s more or less imprinted on me.
I love Patricia C. Wrede so much (although Talking to Dragons is my personal favorite)!
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. Beautiful writing and non-linear storytelling, two of my favorite things. Also, Station Eleven for the same reasons and because it’s a post-apocalyptic story that still believes in the soul, art, and goodness of humanity.
The God of Small Things is so beautiful, and so heartbreaking.
oh man I got the Confessions of Georgia Nicolson for my Kindle recently and I laughed as much at age 24 as I did at age 13. So good.
I AM DOING THE SAME THING! I love those books so much!
Have you read Sorcery and Cecelia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot? It’s by Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer, and if you haven’t read those, then read A College of Magics, A Scholar of Magics and When the King comes home. They’re delicious. I’ve read the pages off a College of Magics. Also Deerskin, the Hero and The Crown and the Blue Sword. I’ll never stop reading these books.
The Hero and The Crown is a classic for me, as well as Beauty and Deerskin and oh who am I kidding everything that Patricia McKinley writes is amazing.
Ohhhh Robin McKinley. She’s going through some bad bad shit now, (I’ve been reading her blog for years) and I want her to get better for her own self, as well as us readers. Neil Gaiman blurbed Sunshine as “Pretty much perfect” and I agree five bazillion percent.
PERFECT BUT IN NEED OF A SEQUEL TO SHARE ITS PERFECTION.
Sunshine is SO GREAT. It’s the book I recommend to people so I can say, “It’s like Twilight, if Twilight were great and had more descriptions of decadent food.”
Here for the McKinley thread!!!
Yes yes YES to the mouthwatering descriptions. I wanted to visit her bakery and live in Rae’s world.
Also a huge fan of Spinde’s End. I found it similar in terms of world-building and heavy description, with the vibe going off in a different direction. Beautifully immersive like Sunshine, but less sex, blood, and chocolate and more faeirie dust, friendship, and animals.
Sorry, this comment morphed into a Goodreads review…
I MAY have read Spindle’s End at some point but clearly need to re-read it. (I had to stop reading McKinley for a while because her “blog voice” infected her “novel voice” but I think I’m over that now.)
Oooh I love Sorcery and Cecelia! Such fun!
LOVE the epistolary magic stories.
Patricia McKillip writes on similar themes, and her writing is so gorgeous and immersive.
I have a deep abiding affection of The Mists of Avalon. I am a big reader, and my mom never was, but she loved that book and so I read it and it always makes me feel close to her.
I just bought Mists of Avalon from the used bookstore a couple of weeks ago! (My exact words to my friend as I picked it up were “It’s a tome! An Arthurian tome! I need more tomes!”) I haven’t gotten around to it yet, but it’s on my list of things to read if I ever get a spare couple of hours to myself.
With you on Dealing with Dragons. I have read that book something like twelve times and will continue to read it forevermore, hallelujah.
I love Beautiful Ruins. It makes me feel like I’m sitting at one of those fancy hotels on the Mediterranean with the yellow and white striped umbrellas and a glass of rose.
Oh cool, I took my kids to pick out a book yesterday and my daughter chose Dealing With Dragons.
You are clearly raising an awesome daughter.
It’s true.
I love The Name of the Wind and I’m one of the few who likes The Wise Man’s Fear even better. I really hope the third book is worth the wait.
So much waiting! Not making the time to re-read until we get an actual publication date on the last book, I loved them both but have forgotten most of the details by now.
I plan to re-read them, out loud, when my kid is born in October. I figure it’ll be good practice for reading to the kid without completely turning my brain to mush. And at this point I’ve re-read them so much that I’m on my third copies.
Good plan! I read The Name of the Wind during many MANY hours nursing the oldest child on mat. leave. Boppys make good book rests.
Love these. I probably need to do a re-read before the third book (someday) comes out.
At this point, I don’t care about The Third Book anymore, all I want is more Auri novels. All the Auri novels.
I want to yell about William Burroughs The Cat Inside. He’s so unsentimental in his other writing, but then he starts in about his cats and all this tenderness comes out. Loving his cats gives him a way to open up about the heartbreak of his son’s addiction and death, and about guilt over the sins of his life.
My favourite books of all time are A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Anne of Green Gables. Both of them I can reread endlessly and always find something new and deeply moving. Especially ATGIB–every time I read it I cry at how simple and heartbreaking and wonderful it is. It’s such a specific but wonderfully evocative portrait of a family and a time that you can smell the sidewalk and you feel the heat. And it’s as much a story about mothers and daughters and Katie as it is about Francie–and families and addiction and struggle and beauty and the mystery of the world. God, I love it. I love it.
For some reason I always assumed it was like an O. Henry type of book and when I read it last year I just loved it sosososososo much and I basically have The Toast to thank for that. Toasties are perfect and wonderful and right about all things.
Agree on everything about this for A Tree Grows in Brooklyn!
I’ve also reread Betty Smith’s “Joy in the Morning” a bunch and found it similarly powerful – I always thought of it as what happens to Francie’s sister Annie Laurie when she is older (though it’s not, even though the main character is also named Annie).
Oh yes, I thought the same thing. I’ve read all four of her books and while they’re all good, nothing can touch ATGIB. Joy in the Morning is such a funny portrait of such an absurdly specific time and place with such fascinating little details–I still want a dog named Jello!
ATGIB and Jacob Have I Loved are my go-to tearjerker young-teen-times books.
I love Anne. I love Emily even more. Man, I should sit down and have an LMM re-read some time.
Oh, Emily’s my favorite. Have you read the Blue Castle?
Yes. Valency Sterling forever.
Yes, Emily! So snarky at times. And Jane of Lantern Hill! I love Jane and her dad.
Oh man, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I was so confused when Williamsburg was on the come up and everyone was talking about how hip and edgy it was. Like, wait, Williamsburg is tenements! This reminds me I’ve lost my copy somewhere and need to get a new one.
I just read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn a few years ago (in my late thirties) and I dearly wished I’d read it as a younger reader. I typically love books about young girls (To Kill a Mockingbird is one of my favorites).
Hello are you me?? I’ve probably read each of those 20 times (at least!). What I love about them is that every time I re-read them, I understand and relate to them in such a different way.
Welp, now I know what I’m doing the rest of the day *googles “read a tree grows in brooklyn online”*
Yes! Especially Tree is underrated I think. It has so many beautifully observed, complicated moments.
The Dresden Files, by Jim Butcher. The books have so many issues – very serious issues with portrayals of women, power creep, ridiculously overdramatic bullshit, and the main character is kind of a creep asshole… but I don’t know, they’re a lot of fun, and I can’t get enough of them. I mean at one point he rides an undead Tyrannosaurus Rex. What else do you need from a book?
I have my problems with those books, and I think I finally gave up on them after Cold Days, but they have pulled me out of more than one reading slump. They’re just so fast-paced and easy to read. Even when I’m not in the mood for anything they can pull me right in.
Have we talked about Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite here yet? It’s about an anthropologist who goes to a planet where a virus killed all the men and the women are somehow reproducing.
I would like someone to yell about it with, because as good as Griffith’s prose and worldbuilding and characters are, I think she is just pretty bad at plot, and promises all sorts of things that are never delivered, and I keep reading anyway because it’s so good and then I get frustrated because we’ve spent fifty pages sitting in a hut beating a drum and skinning rabbits. I had the same problem with Hild!
Nicola Griffith’s The Blue Place is my favorite modern noir. Aud Torvingen is such a badass, yet messed up on the inside. Her first-person narration is great. Have not read her non-mystery books, will try them.
LOVE Dealing with Dragons! A best friend from childhood just got me the first book at my baby shower, we loved those books growing up and I can’t wait to reread and relive all those stories. Just the perfect mix of practicality and fun and magic and humor.
OMG, books for baby shower gifts! Why have I never thought of this!?!? I am very very excited for the next friend’s baby shower I attend now! Thank you!!!
My comfort reads will always be the Tintin books. I love the bright colours, intricate plots, clean lines, simple characterisation and wordy speech bubbles. They always help me pretend the rest of the world doesn’t exist. A pretty problematic fave in many ways, but I still love them,
Yes! I grew up in the states, where Tintin is decidedly not popular, but those stories (and Snowy!) will always have my heart. A problematic fave indeed, though – I am trying to be more mindful of this and educate myself/examine how I feel about it.
Same here — but I totally get what you mean about it being a “problematic fave”. Even as a child, I was definitely not blind to its racism/sexism (my mom actually tried to ban the books from the house on those grounds, which worked about well as you might expect). Although, let’s be real — given the time period, the series was very much Fair For Its Day*. Plus, the stories were so engagingly written and beautifully drawn, that it often made up for any egregious flaws (or just distracted me for long enough until I could detect bullshit).
*Not that that excuses any built-in prejudices, writing-wise or depiction-wise! But I do think the series definitely improved once Herge started to do actual research on the cultures/locales he set his stories in, as opposed to just relying on tired, shitty racial stereotypes.
I reread my childhood fave The Westing Game recently and now I am shouting about The Westing Game! Who is with me?
I am rereading The Westing Game right now and it is exactly as delightful as I remember!
I loved The Westing Game! I re-read my paperback into tatters, thank you for reminding me about it!
I love The Westing Game! I should totally reread that. My baby cousin said they actually read it in class in…5th grade I think it was? Points to that cool as heck teacher.
Ohhhh I should do this! It holds up?
Yes I love the Westing Game! So clever! Such great characters! That book had diversity in kids’ lit before that was even a thing.
The Westing Game! That’s one I reread every once in a while and I’m always surprised how it holds up.
YES! It’s kind of And Then There Were None for kids, but I don’t care because they are both wonderful.
I Capture the Castle. It gets more perfect every time I read it, somehow.
Also The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. Now I gotta go re-read this immediately.
LOVE I Capture the Castle. That’s a comfort read for me, for sure.
My mom read the Guernsey lppps to me out loud when I was in the hospital a couple of years ago. I would never have chosen it with that twee title but I was too sick to object…and it turned out to be great! Go mom!
Dealing with Dragons was such a lucky library find for 10-year-old me. 10-year-old me was a new baby feminist whose feminist causes were: 1. why do boy characters get to have all the FUN? and 2. Girly things are the worrrrssst, boo to dresses and dancing and romance!
That book, you guys. It scratched my itch for a kick-ass girl hero, gave me some silly princesses to sneer at, and a lesson in not dismissing girly things that are actually valuable life skills.
“Edith Hamilton’s Mythology.” Bulfinch be damned! My dad didn’t have a concept of “for kids” in terms of media, so our bedtime stories were whatever books he and my mom had lying around (LotR, Ray Bradbury, etc). My absolute favorite was Edith because he’d have me pick a section (Heroes of the Trojan War or Love and Adventure?) and then he’d randomly pick a story in that section. And since I’m talking mythology, “D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths” should be here, too. A book that I borrowed from my 6th grade classroom over and over and eventually finally owned.
And if we’re discussing books for any age group: “Prisoner of Vampires” by Nancy Garden. My teeny tiny small town library didn’t have “Annie on My Mind,” but it did have this book and “The Dove and the Sword” (which I also enjoyed). PoV was possibly the first book I can recall checking out from the library multiple times. I was deep into reading anything with occult creatures I could get my hands on and PoV was the first book I can remember reading where I was kinda miffed that the villains didn’t get away in the end.
I finally cracked open The Fifth Season, which I’d been putting off so that I could read less fun books about having a baby (though Having Faith, which is an ecologist’s take on her pregnancy is legitimately good, too). But after having been into more sci-fi and magical realism for a while, I’ve realized I really like fantasy where the whole system of magic or power or whatever has rules and has organized study/history of it and doesn’t just seem arbitrary (the same thing is true for sci-fi: you don’t need to explain your tech fully but it better be internally consistent). I think this explains part of my love of Harry Potter and also why I find the non-aggravating parts of the Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones series compelling (there are multiple types of magic! there’s a school that partially studies it! magic gets stronger when dragons exist!). The Fifth Season definitely is internally consistent, plus it’s geology-based magic, and the characters are super interesting and complex. I don’t know if it’s possible for me to dislike anything N. K. Jemisin writes, though, so I might be biased.
I heart all of Jemisin’s work and recently joined her Patreon so that she can quit her day job and write moarrrrrrrr
She did quit her job! I’m so so beyond excited about what’ll happen next.
BookRiot interviewed her about her Patreon on their podcast last week, v cool.
I have a deep affection for stories with practical protagonists. Ursula Vernon’s characters have a similar bent.
I would like to yell about a book I just finished reading, A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab. If you like alternate world fantasy with great worldbuilding and even greater characterization, you should read it! The sequel is out now, too.
I just read that! I liked it!
I definitely agree about the worldbuilding. I’m not sure I’m sold on the characterization? I guess I can think of one or two major character traits for each of Kell and Lila, but not necessarily a lot of depth?
That said, I’ll definitely read books 2 and 3.
But kind of more, I’d like to just read other stories (maybe fanfiction?) set in that universe. I want to find out so much more about the history of the Londons. Maybe some stories set before the split?
Also I have a theory that Kell and Lila are secretly siblings. They both had the potential to be Antari, but he was chosen, and she was discarded/left to live on the streets.
I found my old copy of Dealing with Dragons at my parents’ house last year and was a little afraid to re-read in case it didn’t hold up. But it so held up! I adore how that series subverts the “cool girl” trope by being fundamentally respectful of all its female characters, even the ‘silly’ ones.
A Ring of Endless Light forever and ever and ever! My ultimate comfort read, my favorite summer read, probably my ultimate favorite book.
Also, I own two different copies of it and am always tempted to get more when I see different covers at the local used book store.
The cover and the binding and the font and the weight and the dimensions and the smell totally matter. My husband and I own two copies of the same book and we both refuse to give our copy away because we like the physical book.
My google user pic is definitely not part of this cover nope deffo not:
http://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/photo.goodreads.c…
Ooh, one more book I want to yell about that I read recently: Remnant Population by Elizabeth Moon. It’s science fiction, of the sort that I think people who like Ursula K. LeGuin will enjoy, and the main character is an old lady in her 70s who gets left behind when her planet is abandoned and ends up being the point of first contact with an alien species.
This is probably the only E Moon I haven’t read. I love her books so much.
My boyfriend is one of the few people I know in real life who read these books as a child. I have to say, when he told me that, it was one of the things that made me think “maybe this guy is actually, like, the one?” Those books were / are so wonderful. Might need to do a re-read…
The Last Unicorn. I’m not a big re-reader, but I think I’ll be going back to this one for the rest of my life. (MOLLY GRUE.)
(Also, The Once and Future King. Has capital-P Problems up the wazoo, of course, but it makes my heart aaaaache and ache in the best way.)
I just started reading The Last Unicorn for the first time! Loving it so far.
All Peter Beagle all the time. <3
The Last Unicorn, the book and the movie I <3<3<3 forever.
I mentioned The Last Unicorn to an acquaintance the other day, and she was like, “I love that movie!” And I was like, “It was a book first.” And there was very nearly blood. Which really isn’t her fault, because almost no one knows about that book anymore, but I’m crazy loyal to Peter S. Beagle. And I too have a strange and unreasonable love for The Once and Future King. When we’ve spent 5 pages going over a medieval landscape I want to throw it on the fire, and when Lancelot picks up Gawain’s farewell letter I want to love it and never let it go.
I have to mention the Parasol Protectorate series by Gail Carriger. Not only does it include Miss Alexia Terrabotti – perhaps my favorite female protagonist of all time – but also takes place in a supernatural steampunk version of London and it’s all about vampire politics and werewolves in government and mad scientists and ridiculous hats. Also Alexia has an anti-supernatural combat parasol. It’s the best, you guys.
omg yes!
I randomly happened upon Gail Carriger through my public library’s audiobook downloading app, and they kind of took over my life.
I devoured all the finishing school series books in a little over a week, and then started in on the Parasol Protectorate books. I’ve listened through Blameless and am next in line to check out Heartless.
One of the toasties in our writing group said the novel I’m working on reminded her of the Parasol Protectorate and I immediately gobbled them up & also felt very flattered.
I am still screaming about Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves. Despite the cardboard cutout characters and complicated scientific jargon-y descriptions it has the BEST PAYOFF I HAVE EVER READ OHMYGODDDDD and made me Feel Feelings about the resilience of humanity and the beauty of what we hold dear to us as a people I’m going to go cry now
I’m late with this, but I also really liked Seveneves. I understand a lot of the criticisms, and the third section felt a little shorter than I wanted because the first two sections were so amazing, but the concept is right up my wheelhouse and I also kept thinking about it afterward.
I’m even later than you, and I too enjoyed Seveneves. Despite the first two thirds being ISS fanfiction and orbital mechanics, the last part was so worth it.
I literally comfort read The King of Attolia yesterday. I love Megan Whalen Turner. I can just pick that book up over and over.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy shaped my sense of humor.
The Doomsday Book makes me cry every time.
The entire Little House series is my comfort reading. Nostalgia, Ma Ingalls Thinks You’re a Wuss, and the meals, wow
The Time Quartet – all my copies are wrinkled from being read in the bathtub as a teen
Yes to all of these.
Jack O’Connell’s Quinsigamond series: Box Nine, Wireless, The Skin Palace, and Word Made Flesh. Set in a strange area of Massachusetts (that actually exists but is nothing at all like the world of the novels) where everything is corrupt and nothing is ever as it seems.
Each book centers around a different form of media or government and then just spirals out from there (Box Nine is about the Post Office and the police department, Wireless is all about underground illegal radio stations, The Skin Palace is about porno theaters, Word Made Flesh is about rare book dealers). The world-building of the city is incredible and all the (almost all incredibly seedy or depraved) characters are a blast to get to know. Imagine over-the-top gritty noir with lots of sex put through a David Lynch filter and you get the idea.
It’s a series of books that almost no one knows exist (yay old school library discoveries!) and I’m pretty sure the actor Jack O’Connell is going to render him more obscure.
Also, and I will gush less about this one despite the fact that I love it too, but Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago is the perfect book. Section 1 (about Death taking a break from doing their job and the complications that ensue) is pretty great. Section 2 (in which Death resumes her duties and comes to Earth assuming a human form to try and kill a person who somehow evaded her sentence and ends up falling in love with a classical musician) is some of the most gorgeous and heartbreaking writing Saramago ever did.
Anybody Can Do Anything by Betty Smith. Betty lives in Seattle during the Great Depression and her very confident sister Mary gets her one impossible job after another. This book is great at conjuring up the love of family and joy in spite of financial hardships.
I love to reread books so these are some of the ones I do on a yearly or biyearly basis:
Anne of Green Gables (the whole series) by LMM
There is something so comforting about Anne. Lots of problematic parts and stuff where I want to shake the poor girl and tell her she could be so much more with a dash of feminism. But! Them were the times.
A Song of Ice and Fire by GRRM
I honestly picked up A Game of Thrones years and years ago because it was the fattest book on the shelf at my bookstore. I hate being “done” a book too fast. I want to immerse myself in the world, and GRRM does that in spades.
Lord of the Rings by JRRT
LotR is a classic and is sort of a stand in for all the many fantasy books I’ve loved throughout the years.
Okay, running out of acronym names 🙂
Sometimes it’s not the book but the author so I need to talk about NK Jemisin. Every new book of hers I read I get more upset about how amazing she is and how much I love her writing. The Inheritance trilogy, Dreamblood duology, the Fifth Season… I can’t get enough of her work. She’s writing the new Mass Effect book and it’s the first time I’ve been interested in buying a video game book ever. (I love video games, I just don’t care for tie-in novels really).
NO NO NOT MORE BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS I’M WEAK AND EASILY INFLUENCED. *weeps softly and hugs her huge new pile of books which also contains Dealing with Dragons*
I’ve culled at least 20 books from this thread alone for summer reading and haven’t even started going through old book comment threads yet.
Other than my favourite re-reads that everyone else loves (Tamora Pierce, Terry Pratchett, Patricia C. Wrede) I have one book that is like a comfort blanket and I like to re-read it once a year. It’s Invitation to the Game by Monica Hughes, and it’s both a coming-of-age story where the teens are dumped from their state school onto the streets, and a learn-to-survive-in-the-wild in the same spirit of Lost in the Barrens, My Side of the Mountain etc. Only the narrator is a teen girl, which was a balm to my tiny survivalist story fan heart.
Holy crap, I totally read that when I was a preteen and haven’t thought about it in years! That was an intense one to read at age 13 (but good).
The books that I’ve read more than any others are the Darkangel Trilogy by Meredith Ann Pierce. I think of them as YA, but in my heart of hearts, I know they’re probably for a younger audience than that. I got my first copies when I was really young and on a trip with my family to Spokane (the big city for us, being from northern Idaho). There is or was a children’s book store in River Park Square and the cover of the the first book caught my eye (it was a small paperback with a kind of luminous blue-gold background and the eponymous darkangel). My dad had said that he would get my sister and I one book each, but I wanted all three. My sister very nobly offered to sacrifice her book so that I could get two, which drove my dad to cave and get me all three anyway (and my sister still got her book).
I devoured them, maybe finishing the fist one on the drive home, and I’ve read them all maybe a dozen times or more. To me, they epitomize excellent fantasy/sci-fi/romance for kids, especially young girls, and I wish that they had taken the place of Twilight and its ilk. The heroine falls in love with the darkangel, but she never loses her agency or acts like a helpless maiden. Throughout the first book, she grows from a downtrodden servant into an independent, decisive character who is willing to make very personal sacrifices for the good of the world. The end of the last book is absolutely heartbreaking but perfect for the character. It still makes me tear up.
yeeeeeeeeeees I was literally just about to yell about these books. I definitely read the first one in its entirety while sitting in the parking lot while my Dad was in Home Depot. Irrylath was such a dirtbag but that series deserves more fame than I feel like it has.
Nowhere near enough acclaim. Irrylath was a Grade A Scuzzball who didn’t deserve Ariel, but she wanted him, so I wanted her to have him. She earned a mopey, formerly evil boyfriend!
Oh! Has anyone read I’ll Give You the Sun, by Jandy Nelson?
Hands down the best thing I read last year.
SO good. Yes. Everyone needs to read it now!
Yes! I loved it. Another good queer YA I read recently is Everything Leads to You by Nina Lacour. It’s got mystery, girls who work on a Hollywood film set, and a super-sweet romance. I don’t know how realistic the main character’s job is (she’s a recent high school grad who works as a set designer on an indie movie), but I loved hearing the details about her work as well as her romance with the lead actress.
Book yelling! A few years ago, I made a list of the top ten plot elements that will usually get me to consider a book, if not read it outright. I can’t find the original list now, but I just put together my new and improved version, just for this thread:
1. boarding schools
2. rich people being terrible
3. girls masquerading as boys to go on adventures
4. time travel
5. mysterious houses
6. secret gays
7. the supernatural
8. the Victorian era
9. WWII
10. cameos from historical figures
So, so many of the books I’ve loved (at any and all stages of my life) have fallen into at least one of these categories, it’s almost weird.
A+ list, would read.
Sooooo…have you read Connie Willis’ time traveling historians of Oxford books? Because I think To Say Nothing of the Dog and Blackout/All Clear might really appeal to you. Although you should probably start with Doomsday Book for the background. (which is also great, by the way)
Oh, I have already been introduced to the wonder that is Connie Willis (Doomsday Book is my favorite so far!), and I can’t wait until there’s a new time-traveling historians book for me to devour.
I know she’s got a new book out sometime this year (unless it’s out already?) and I’m excited for it, but let’s be reasonable, the historian books are the best.
Oh good! I figured you must have considering your list! I hadn’t heard she has a new book coming – will have to look it up!
It comes out in september or october i forget which and it’s about what happens if you can share your brain thoughts with someone else but they accidentally hook you up to the wrong person! or something like that, basically it reminds me of Anne McCaffrey’s empath series from a 21st century tech POV and also 150% less incesty/pedo.
I now want to read a book with ALL these elements. I don’t know how that would work, exactly, but hey, the time travel will make it possible for something to be set in both the Victorian and WWII eras, right?
Also, I’m assuming, with your list, that you’ve read Sarah Waters’ stuff?
If anyone could manage to shoehorn all of those plot elements into a single book, I feel like it would be a) a beautiful trainwreck and b) the best book ever.
I have read some Sarah Waters, but I know I have lots more to read–mostly The Night Watch, because my fiancee keeps asking if I’ve read The Night Watch yet.
ANYTHING BY JENNY CRUISIE. Sorry, I just really like all her books. The Gotobed family is my ideal family.
Robin McKinley’s Sunshine and Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin are probably my go-to’s, along with the Vorkosigan saga and the Liaden universe novels.
The other two series I hug to my chest and re-read compulsively are Sarah Caudwell’s mysteries and Dorothy Dunnett’s Johnson Johnson novels. The writing is so clever and the narrators are SO unreliable, but I just want to plunk myself down and be a part of those universes forever.
Yassss… A woman after my own heart. I like her Kim and Mairelon books too (forgot the names).
Jacqueline Carey writes some good mind-candy comfort reading. I re-read her Agent of Hel and Kushiels’ Dart trilogy every year or so.
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis, forever favorite.
School has been getting in the way of books lately (rude), but sometimes when I’m really homesick I pull out The House On Mango Street and just sort of… faceplant into it for a few hours. I love that little book so much.
I have several super favorite books, but the one that I like to mention on these lists because I think it deserves so much more attention is Adios, Happy Homeland! by Ana Menéndez.
It’s sort of experimental in form but not really. It’s short stories that are part of the same big story, but in a meandering kind of way, and with very different styles and narrators, but still lots of experimental (and one is entirely in Spanish), and all of them are on the theme of being Cuban or Cuban-American and what that means, either living on the island or in Miami or elsewhere.
(ETA: Just copypasting my description of the style/format from my LibraryThing review: The book is formatted like an anthology of short stories, including author bios in the back, which is the part that tricked me, until I started reading. All the stories are interconnected in some way, and they all share a theme of “flight” (both the literal flying definition and the escape connotation). There is a lot of imagery of trains, balloons, swimming, holes-in-the-sky-to-the-stars, and as related images, wind and the stars.)
BOOK-YELLING: I will rec The Phantom Tollbooth to any reader of any age, anytime. I also reread it at least once a year for mental health reasons.
I just got my dad a paperback copy for Father’s Day because he’s both a mathematician and goofball lover of puns. I keep getting texts from him that say things like “Out of the Doldrums!” and “At the marketplace in dictionopolis!” and it is delightful because I know he’s giggling while reading this on a bus somewhere.
Dear Killer by Katherine Ewell, a teenage girl trained by her mother to be the perfect serial killer, it SOUNDS like a trashy as hell premise which I love & is why I bought it but it was /so much more/ & I rec it whenever I can.
Sunshine by Robin McKinley will always be my favorite “everything is wrong with the world; can I give up now, please?” book, and I haven’t read another book of hers that I haven’t liked. Her blog is inspirational in that she is the lady I aspire to be one day: http://robinmckinleysblog.com/
So I’m super late but eh I don’t care I’m always up for book yelling.
-the Daine books by Tamora Pierce which I always liked better than the Alanna books come at me
-the Darkangel books by Meredeth Ann Pierce which I guarantee I only picked up because the Tamora Pierce books were out at the bookstore that day, but which are glorious early-80s fantasy that spell vampire with a y.
-Both the Nightrunner books and the Tamir books by Lynn Flewelling. I’m rereading them now and they definitely have their issues but they hit me at this point when I was 16 when I just *needed* them and they will always be my favorites. I still hope against all reason for a TV adaptation. Wizards, necromancy, hot boys in love with each other, the end.
-Frankenstein, which I read every two years or so
-David Mitchell, I will read anything he ever wants to write for the rest of my life
-The Sound and the Fury, which, it kind of pisses me off how much I love that book, but I really, really do.
I probably have dozens of others that deserve to be yelled about, but that’s what occurs to me now.
I just reread all the Tamir and Nightrunner books in chronological order earlier this year. It was interesting to reread them all in one go since I had reread some more than others and some not at all and they were written over a pretty long span of time. I capped it by finally reading the last one, Shards of Time, which I quite enjoyed. I find I still don’t like Shadows Return and The White Road very much, but I enjoy the hell out the others. There’s some really interesting body dysmorphia/trans implications stuff in the Tamir books that I just can’t decide how I feel about, and also some interesting racial implications that really only became apparent in Shards of Time.
Also, wizards, necromancy, hot boys in love with each other, queens regnant, the end!
how did I forget to mention the queeeeeeeeeens the beautiful matriarchy ah I’m so ashamed of myself. /bad fan
I’ve only read Shards of Time the once so far and it kind of disappointed me. I’m wondering how a reread will feel. I still think Shadows Return and The White Road should have been one book–cut both down and smush em together and I think they would have been vastly more satisfying. The racial stuff that came out towards the end of the series was downright odd. But and still, those books are always going to be special to me. Lynn Flewelling is the only author I have ever gotten the courage to mail a fan letter to, and she emailed me back, and I was like seventeen and *so impressed* and I still have that email.
I just re-read Dealing With Dragons earlier this month for my 365 books by women challenge!
It gave me a very useful line to use at work (I work at an animal hospital), which is that I now say “None of this nonsense, please” to a dog at least four times/day.
You are too good to us. And congratulations to your stepmother. That’s amazing.
I posted about this yesterday, but just wanted to post here for the people who aren’t on Twitter. I’m working on an illustrated zine for my “If Oscar Isaac Were Your Boyfriend” piece. You can pre-order PDF or print copies here, at my Big Cartel store.
(If you can’t afford it, feel free to send me a message and I’ll print an extra one for you!)
Thank you for creating the absolute perfect gift for an Oscar Isaac-obsessed friend of mine.
Oh the lords I am not prepared for this.
What is your favourite Toast piece? I will never stop laughing at the Comment Section on Every Recipe Blog, Mallory’s comments on the Rock’s cod diet, her Go Ask Alice revelation, or the “animal rescue adoption form you will never master.”
I went into actual hysterics over the Rock’s cod diet (particularly someone’s comment I can’t find so will paraphrase: “If all you eat is fish of course we smell what you’re cooking!”)
My husband was deeply concerned for me.
The Comment Section On Every Recipe Blog was my first dip-of-the-toe into The Toast.
The comments from the post about Mallory’s parent’s refrigerator when her fam join in. I just die every time. 💗
OH EM GEEE I looked up the comment section of the refrigerator piece, THAT IS THE FUNNIEST THING I HAVE READ ON ALL OF THE-TOAST!!
I’m forever in your debt.
Either My Wonderful Drag Prom or What Abortions Should Be Like. They’re both excellent pieces to go to when you have all the feelings but aren’t quite sure what those feelings are or if they’re because of the heteropatriarchy.
I think about What Abortions Should be Like so much. It’s wonderful and the first time I cried over a Toast article at my desk in the middle of the library.
“How To Tell if You are in a Jane Austen Novel,” I still laugh at “your real mother is either dead or ridiculous” and “your father is terrible with money. No one has ever mentioned this to him” because both are entirely accurate about my own family.
The Rocket Cats article was one of the first ones I read and one that I still go back to sometimes because I like it so much.
http://the-toast.net/2014/06/05/german-rocket-cat…
YES, Rocket Cats is my all time favorite. I once gave a live reading of it at a table in a bar to all of my friends.
I remember reading Mallory’s Ayn Rand Reviews Children’s Books to my husband until we were both in tears.
kindly pipe down and listen
listen in a me of direction
it’s the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, of course.
Link’s Romantic Options In Ocarina of Time, Ranked was the first Toast article I ever read and will always be my favorite.
Sometimes I’ll start giggling for no reason and my dudeman will sigh and put his arm around me and say “Are you thinking about that raccoon piece again?” and he will always be right.
The New Year’s Eve Hey Ladies where Gracie freed herself.
Oh, but also the one about the gender binary and Sheik in Ocarina of Time. Pretty sure I just want to tattoo that whole piece on my body.
RATBOAT! That’s like the only Toast piece my sister & I have shared with our dad and it still makes him chuckle.
My favorites are Which Jane Austen Heroine Are You? — because Mallory called us all out immediately in that piece and It’s 2050 and Feminism has Finally Won — because it is my dreams articulated.
Male Novelist Jokes sums it all up for me: http://www.thetoast.net/2013/11/04/male-novelist-…
There is a video of Mallory reciting this one and it’s glorious:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUrqUWNcSOg
I am distraught we’ll never get another Sexiest Man Alive piece.
There are so many to choose from, but the last line of Tasbeeh Herwees’ The Names They Gave Me still haunts my mind. I still return to it and turn it over in my mind every week or so.
The Chris Kimball letters are hold a very special place in my heart. They’re like my hole in the Amigara Fault, know what I mean?
The armrest wars. I have taken that article 100% at face value. And of course everything inthe Made Horrifying series because they are perfect.
But I would also like to give a weepy shoutout to the link roundups whose lack during Nicole’s mat leave destroyed my whole internet.
The two-part saga of the cotched kitten!
I have been gleefully using the word cotched every day since I read it and it has made my life at least 47% better. (It helps that my 2 year old is in a ‘fling herself at mommy yelling CATCH’ phase, so I can reply ‘I cotched you!’ triumphantly)
It’s WAY too hard for me to pick a favourite, but I’ll always think fondly of this one: http://the-toast.net/2015/06/18/how-to-behave-whe…
I read it to my sister after we’d just finished the first season of Outlander (so, timely) and we legit LOL’d, dudes.
Yes, I loved that! On a similar note of sound good sense, I enjoyed How to Become an Undetected Serial Killer.
Jessica Valenti’s piece Sunday Sauce, Saving Me. She is the reason I first identified as a feminist many years ago, and I love all her writing. This piece was so formative and powerful, and I think about it often. I’m so thankful she wrote it, and that The Toast published it.
I will always have great affection for Levels of Purse Anxiety it is Possible to Have: http://the-toast.net/2015/12/09/levels-of-purse-a… because it spurred my delurking and I haven’t shut up since!
I love this one too! It was one of those “oh, of COURSE other people feel this way” pieces/comment threads.
The two pieces I love the most are Gleeful Mobs of Women Murdering Men in Western Art History (sorry I don’t know how to better format this): http://the-toast.net/2015/01/26/gleeful-mobs-wome…
and Where’s My Cut: On Unpaid Emotional Labor: http://the-toast.net/2015/07/13/emotional-labor/
They’re not unrelated.
Definitely linked by the level of Men in the deleted comments.
Ha! Deleted comments collectively could rank as my third favorite piece. Our moderators truly do the lord’s work.
Emotional labor (for male powers-that-be) is a huge component of my job. An extra component, for which I’m neither paid extra nor have the time spent coddling egos factored into my workload. There are days when I come home wishing I had my own sororal mob.
The Rock’s cod diet is indeed a masterpiece and I adore Two Monks, but I also howl any time Mallory was faced with owls.
ETA wait, I forgot about the Australian take on Pride and Prejudice! Fantastic.
Same! Owl Faces, In Order is the thing I go back to on a bad day to make myself laugh. It’s the thing I point to when someone wants to know what my sense of humor is like (and I always know that someone is probably not my kind of person when they don’t think it’s funny at all). I read it at work and ended up embarrassing myself because I literally laughed so hard I cried, but it was so worth it.
A kind of long short list:
-What Ina Garten Teaches Me About Love
-Fictional Characters Whose Lives Would Have Been Vastly Improved By An Abortion
-Comment Section on Every Recipe Blog
-Deleted Comments From the White Dude Book List (PEAK MISANDRY)
-Comment Section for Every Article Ever Written About Intimate Grooming
-Two Monks Invent Dinner Parties
-every Women in Art History
-Baby Derrida
-every single Texts From / You know you’re in a _____ novel
-Ronbledore
-Jaya’s Books are my Bestfriends (Little Women is my mom and Redwall is my dad and my siblings are all of Elena Ferrante’s novels and someday I’m going to marry The Bell Jar and you won’t be invited because you never liked books anyway, not like I do.)
-A Very Important Question about Redwall
-Dirtbag Ezra Pound
-The comments on our Most Dirtbag Summer OT
-The Nicole’s “Let’s Get Personal: On Full Financial Aid at Fancy Schools” was the piece that prompted me to de-lurk
-Nicole’s Prayer piece (but even more so, the comments on that piece were so so wonderful)
-Bible Verses Where The Word “Tithe” Has Been Replaced With “Ass, Grass, Or Cash – Nobody Rides For Free”
-Everything Nikki writes about race
-Everything Nikki writes about finances
-Everything Nikki writes
Also, our Femme Flash/Gilmore Girls:
Rory and Paris, The Real Gilmore Girls
All I Want For The New Gilmore Girls Revival Is For Emily Gilmore To Become A Late-In-Life Lesbian
Yes, Ronbledore!
Always and forever my favorite is the poem “Why I Am Not Coming In To Work Today”: http://the-toast.net/2013/12/17/not-coming-to-wor… I have copies: in my wallet; on my work bulletin board (irony?); above my desk at home; and saved on my phone. When was my life last that luminous?
Tied for second: “God-night, Rune” by Cassandra Rassmussen http://the-toast.net/2014/12/11/god-night-rune-ol… and “If Gillian Anderson Were Your Girlfriend” http://the-toast.net/2015/06/18/if-gillian-anders…
My favorite comment of all time will be the addition to “If Channing Tatum Were Your Boyffriend”: If Channing Tatum were your boyfriend, every time you drove past a field of horses, he would point out the window and proclaim, “Horses.”
Albums in Which
And I am haunted, but in a weirdly pleasant way, by Considering A Possible Human Head. I think about it when I do the laundry. It’s so unsettling, yet so YES THIS PIECE GETS ME at the same time. (Don’t click if you can’t do creepy right now.)
ETA: guys what if the last Hey Ladies is posted today. :O
I have been thinking about how very sad I would be if we never got a final Hey Ladies. Apparently they are the one thing that I need closure on here, weirdly.
ETA: I had never read “Considering a Possible Human Head” somehow, but I am now, and I feel oddly validated by it because I’m the kind of person who might have this concern. (I’m the kind of person who sometimes thinks, “Okay, so what do I do if there’s a dead body?” when pushing open restroom stall doors.)
YES I DO TOO. Well, specifically, passed-out person, not dead. But yes, there MIGHT be a body in there.
Toast Points last Friday mentioned there WILL be a Hey Ladies before the time is up!
Sweet! (I was not online last Friday and missed that, so now I am glad to know that my hopes will come true!)
In a strange way, a passed-out person might be more harrowing than a dead one, because then I’d have to figure out if I should do something for them–CPR? 911? How much time do I have? What’s wrong with them? Do they have a medical ID bracelet? Wallet card?–but with a dead person, at least figuring out what to do is a little less time-sensitive.
. . . Welp, that got darker than I planned. Wow. Sorry.
Don’t be sorry. I bet this conversation is very personal-weird-thing-validating for a lot more people than you & me.
I MISSED THAT. Never have I been so eager to cringe in sheer horror as I am today.
Prediction: The Ladies are now Very Old somehow and fighting over what vacation to take in retirement.
YESSSSSS. I have never been so relieved at anything ever.
I EXPECT DEAD BODIES TOO! Especially if I’m hiking or in kind of a swampy area or basically anywhere with greenery or bushes, I can’t help but double check for a bag of kittens (alive of course! Because I have a kitten savior complex!) or a mystery body discovery. I don’t really want either of these scenarios to occur though, universe.
EVERY Hey Ladies is my favorite Toast post.
Also, Ask Bear. <3
Also, The Comments on Every Bra Thread Ever (and the comments on The Comments on Every Bra Thread Ever).
Also, The Toast introduced me to Carvell Wallace’s writing. HOLY TOLEDO.
I’d completely forgotten that the Go Ask Alice article was my first introduction to The Toast! I’d been reading up a lot about the Satanic Panic of the 80s, and Mallory’s revelation made me laugh so hard that I had to read it straight through twice in a row.
We had a thread like this on the ToastCrumbs subreddit, and I put some of my favorites there.
I also think about the sun-head-friends from Really Excellent Pointing In Western Art History about once a week, and am regularly seized with the desire to punctuate awkward conversation with “AHAHAHAHA NORMAL CONVERSATION, EXEUNT”
Not a piece, but one of my favorite toast memories is the post where we all talked about the books we hated. I was HOWLING with laughter, and I still go back and read all those comments occasionally.
Yes, I loved that! Any posts in which we can all share our irrational (or perfectly rational!) hatreds are great.
Probably A Day In the Life of a Troubled Male Antihero. Oh, and Why I Am Leaving New York City (” the rent is controlled by another damn wizard ” gets me every time.) And I shouldn’t forget As A Father of Daughters. Mallory is an incandescent font of merciless satire.
A couple of my faves that have especially stuck with me since they were published are the short story “Pretty Dead Girl Takes a Break” and the poem “Let Me Tell You About New York.”
Every piece on the Toast is my favorite, until the next one is published, and then that’s my favorite.
But in all seriousness, I have different favorites depending on what mood I’m in/what I most need to read at the moment. And sometimes my favorite piece is actually a comment thread on a Link Roundup.
Also, this seems like a good time to say that a friend of mine, when I posted something of Mallory’s to FB, said that “Mallory Ortberg is the writer I most want to be like, but know that I will never be,” or more eloquent words to that effect.
Ayn Rand’s The Devil Wears Prada, which I have accepted as canon.
ANDREA DESERVED SO MUCH MORE THAN SHE GOT.
I love “The Wikipedia Entry for Guam Retold as a YA Novel” so much. I try to read it to others but then I’m laughing too hard to talk
If Stanley Tucci Were Yoir Boyfriend and How to Make Friends as an Adult, and particularly its comments which provided me great comfort!
THE MOBSTER WHO WANTS A PET RABBIT.
C’mon, Vic!
I love all of the Western Art History posts, but I think about Unsatisfied Women In Western Art History pretty much every single waking minute.
http://the-toast.net/2014/09/09/unsatisfied-women…
Bookmarking to come back to in the future when there are No New Posts
(oh god now I have to go crawl under my desk & start sobbing)
Its a tie between “Your spirit animal is here” and “every Californian novel ever”
Bless you, Mallory.
I need to add the Wishbone pitch meeting. That was a thing of wonder and beauty.
And the time that one of the swole Norwegian guys who hangs out around miniatures to make himself feel bigger showed up in a comment thread. <3
My baby is due to arrive today and it’s starting to look like she may be on time. It’s a nice distraction from the end of the Toast as I figure I wouldn’t have had time to keep up with content for the next little bit anyway … (although I probably won’t be at a computer to order a tote tomorrow, either).
Welcome, Baby, to a world in which the Toast still exists! May you keep the shining promise of cheerful misandry close to your heart as you set about becoming too witches for everything (except your Mama.)
Congratulations!
Congratulations! Safe journey to you and your new baby about to arrive.
Good luck!
Safe birth and happy baby!
Yay! Happy birthing day to you!
Best wishes! Hope all goes well and smoothly.
Eeeee! Sending you and your little one both encouraging wishes for a good delivery.
Good luck!
Ahhhh so exciting! Good luck and and may you have a wonderful birth!
Woohooo! Good luck, and you are going to crush it!
Congratulations! And I hope everything is safe and quick, and I wish the best health to you and your baby.
Hooray for baby! Good wishes for a safe birth, and a preemptive welcome to the world for your daughter!
Good luck!
Congratulations! Can you get someone to order you a tote?
Congratulations on impending arrival. Totes can wait, right?
Congrats and many blessings over to your New Mom!
Twin Cities Toasties! We’ll be having a drop-in/drop-out meetup at Sea Salt from 4-7pm on Thursday. Would love to see you there!
I can’t make that time, but is there a thread/group/chat thing for TC toasties to keep updated on future meetups? I’m a recent transplant and would be psyched to meet some of y’all.
We’ve been mostly congregating on the _midwest channel on toastie slack. There’s also this fb group, but it’s not as active. https://www.facebook.com/groups/530207480428344/ If you’re on twitter, you can find me @liz_the_lemur; I try to keep a running list in my head of local folks. Hope to see you soon!
Followed! Thank you 🙂
So, I’ve been thinking a lot about what books I would teach if I was ever a teacher (note: probably never, I can’t deal with kids). Do any other Toasties have a book they would have loved to have read in class instead of reading The Great Gatsby for the fourth time? (and To Kill a Mockingbird three times. Thanks for changing it up, school). I would have loved to have read Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, because I don’t think we ever read a single thing with a non-straight protagonist. Also Jeanette Winterson’s writing is amazing.
Anne Carson translations, especially her Orestia, which is one of my favorites. I think it would’ve gotten a lot of people A LOT more interested in ancient Greek poems and plays. I know I would have cared more, and I probably already cared more than many of my classmates.
Autobiography of Red was one of those things that just shattered my idea of what literature could and could not do when I was in college, but I really think it would be appropriate and accessible for a high school audience as well! Especially vs. the heavily, heavily abridged versions of Greek classics we actually got to read…
Yes! It’s challenging, but also interesting! And if only it was easier to give teachers the freedom to teach interesting books that challenge such ancient cannon, jeez, imagine, at the very least, how many more cool reinterpretations of these stories we would have!
Also, I just thought of the Matt Fraction series Ody-C, a sci-fi gender swapped retelling of the Odyssey! I haven’t read it all, but I think it would make a great companion piece to teaching the Odyssey at a high school level.
My high school was kind of weird about books (in the years since I graduated there have been challenges to everything from Toni Morrison to Anne Frank, with the primary commonality being that things written by either white men or Jane Austen get to stay and everything else is Bad), so anything I would hypothetically suggest would no doubt be shot down.
Dom Casmurro, by Machado de Assis. I love the style and it’s a great example of an unreliable narrator and the dangers of romantic jealousy. Plus, it’s a beautiful work by a Latin American author who isn’t Gabriel Garcia Marquez; I love the guy, but a lot of times he’s held up as the only Latin American author in US schools when that is in fact not the case.
I would have loved to read more Latin@ authors in high school – we did In The Time of the Butterflies, and that was it, I think. It wasn’t even required reading, just a pet project that teacher assigned the honors classes when she couldn’t come up with anything else. Always seemed weird that a curriculum in California could have like five Steinbeck books but no Latin@ authors.
Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
The protagonist growing up in a household where she learned to always be on watch for signs from the people around her on how to behave and then going to her Auntie’s house where it was ok to just be, I would have loved to read that as a kid.
This may be more advanced, but I read Frankenstein for a college class and it really completely changed the way I looked at it: I thought it was boring at first but then found out it was fascinating.
I read Jane Eyre for the same class, and you can look at that from a bunch of different angles too.
Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf.
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou’s memoir)
Those would all have been helpful/useful to read.
I think everyone should read Americanah. Not just in the U.S. but also, or maybe especially, in Europe.
I’m reading The Handmaid’s Tale right now, and I wish wish wish we had read that in school instead of The Scarlet Letter. Both have the slut-shaming aspect, but the former makes it feel terrifyingly real and the latter is just kind of like, “Oh, yeah, slut-shaming, but also LOOK HOW MANY WORDS I HAVE FOR REDNESS!”
I did read The Handmaid’s Tale in high school! But I wish it had been handled differently than it was. It was part of a dystopian unit, so there were four books presented (Handmaid’s Tale, Fahrenheit 451, 1984, and Brave New World). We broke into groups; each group read one of the books and then gave a presentation about it. I ended up reading all of them, because I’m like that, but I felt like the division meant we all missed a lot of each book.
Did you also go to high school in Southern Ontario? I enjoyed that unit!
The last line just conjured up a mental image for me of the Tootsie Pop Owl listing different shades of red.
“Criiiimson, scarlet, raaaaspberry, ruby…”
One of my English teachers gave me The Handmaid’s Tale to read because he knew I was so incredibly bored and over whatever we were reading at the time (King Lear maybe?), and I really wish it had been something whole class read rather than at least one of the dumber books we had to read.
I read the Handmaid’s Tale in Grade 9 English for independent study. After my presentation, my teacher told the the class that the book wasn’t nearly as interesting as my presentation made it sound. It is one of the proudest moments of my entire life.
For some reason, my English teacher for Grades 10-12 hated Margaret Atwood so we didn’t never read any Atwood as a class
I love The Scarlet Letter and feel it’s a good work to read for a sample of early American literature. But I don’t think it’s a good book to read to encourage teens to think about slut shaming, double standards, sexual policing etc. in relation to their own lives. From a contemporary perspective, the Puritans come across an exotic Other and the language reinforces that sense of inaccessibility and alienness. I agree that the Handmaid’s Tale is a much better work for getting teens to think about how these issues affect them.
I read a lot of Vonnegut on my own in high school and I think it helped me get through my feelings of, welp we’re all fucked. One of my teachers did an amazing unit on Animal Farm with us where she taught two full weeks of historical context before we actually read the book and it was a beautiful thing to understand what was going on in the book before reading it. Another fantastic teacher read The House on Mango Street with the year behind me and I wished I’d been in that class.
When I got to college, one of my first classes had us read a bunch of different origin stories from Islam, Christianity, Greek and Roman mythology, etc. Surprise, surprise–they’re all very similar.
Mostly I just wish we had read fewer white people and more women, but that’s an always kind of feeling.
Oh my gosh, we read Animal Farm in middle school advanced studies with zero historical context whatsoever. None! It was not a good experience.
Heart of Darkness was taught to us with ZERO mention of anything going on in the Belgian Congo. Like, yea, the story can be applied to lots of abstract ideas about life, and that is awesome. But Conrad was very specifically writing about the ABSOLUTE TERROR that the people in the Congo were subject to, and that gets totally erased for a “into the mind of Man” type interpretation. It wasn’t until I read King Leopold’s Ghost that I realized that there really wasn’t anything metaphorical about Heart of Darkness’ descriptions.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT MATTERS!
Oh, ditto! We did Heart of Darkness as part of the dystopian canon, basically? Like, it was right in there between 1984 and Brave New World. I think the word “colonialism” was mentioned a grand total of… once.
Now that I know better it amazes me that it is taught in any way other than “Today in Things That Sucked: Colonialism! Over to our reporter on the ground, Joseph Conrad!”
Honestly teaching it any other way is downright outrageous and totally minimizes “the horror, the horror” that was the Belgian abuse of the Congo.
Seconding Mango Street. That was an amazing book.
I am a English teacher! And my favorite book to teach is Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Adichie; also, James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son” and August Wilson’s “Fences”. I also had a lot of fun teaching Oscar Wilde’s “An Ideal Husband” and also Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Sylvia Plath.
You are doing great work 🙂
I would have loved to have read Adichie and Baldwin in school.
Parable of the Sower/Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler. So good! And they plant the seed of the best possible worldview, I think, one that is developmental and kind and hard-assed all at the same time.
Oooo, good question and great suggestions from everyone.
I’d like to teach Rebecca, and I think I would encourage kids to read more short stories – they’re more digestible to short attention spans than novels, and easier to get through in a lesson. I remember interminable lessons reading little bits of Pride and Prejudice at a time and never getting through the whole thing because the teachers simply didn’t have the time to get 30 restless teenagers through a Regency novel. I also think unpacking short stories is a good way of getting people into unpacking poetry and not being intimidated by it. Ama Ata Aidoo has some great stories in ‘No Sweetness Here’.
My husband just got to teach The Most Dangerous Game and give his eighth graders a whole bunch of historical info that I definitely didn’t know and they really got it! Short stories can be such rich opportunities for learners at any age, but I think especially for middle and high school kids.
Also, I watched Rebecca for a film class I had in college and it was AWESOME to pick apart.
Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades hit me like a freight train as a young person. Her short stories are spare and melancholy and incisive.
Barbara Kingsolver, novels or essays. Her work is so full of lessons in empathy and perfectly crafted words and probably too much sex (from a woman’s perspective, and she LIKES it, and it doesn’t LEAD DIRECTLY TO TRAGEDY) for any school system.
Agree, because we did read the Poisonwood Bible in high school, and it was a huge favorite for a lot of the class. This was in the Bible Belt, so that was probably a pretty world-challenging book for a lot of people!
We read Pigs In Heaven in high school! It was great.
Yes! I read The Bean Trees when I was 13 and I think in was genuinely a book that changed me and made me feel bigger things. I reread it almost once a year. (Although lately I’ve been especially fond of Prodigal Summer, mostly Lusa’s parts.)
Ever since I learned that Steinbeck STOLE all the field notes & research for his crappy “Grapes of Wrath” from Sanora Babb and quickly got published first so her book deal got squashed, I’ve wanted justice for her. So I think students should read “Whose Names are Unknown” (which eventually got published years later) instead of dumb ol’ Steinbeck.
This is very unspecific, but I would have loved to read anything by a woman my sophomore year of high school. The theme that year was American literature, and our teacher didn’t have much of choice from the school in what she was teaching, and all of the books were by men. She did purposely assign us a Barbara Kingsolver book for our summer read to get one in there, but I just don’t understand how school curriculums can make room for a different Shakespeare play every year (because despite it being an American literature year, we still read Othello), but not find room for one American woman author (apparently I’m still bitter about this all these years later).
That’s awful! My American Lit class included Bless Me Ultima and Their Eyes Were Watching God. They were token books for sure, among Huck Finn and Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye, but at least they were there.
For little kids: If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. I give a copy every time I’m invited to a baby shower. Teaches you to be polite, but also set boundaries and not let people take advantage of you.
Things I’ve enjoyed teaching:
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Half-Hanged Mary (poem)
The Odyssey (I know, pretty traditional but one of my favorites)
Woman at Point Zero
Essays of Virgina Woolf
Things I’d like to teach:
Americanah
Land of Love and Drowning
a pile of longreads about things like feminism, the AIDS crisis, race in America, which would fit nicely into the current trend for nonfiction in English class
I feel like there are more, they’ll come to me
Ooh! The Penelopiad
I would teach the Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, and (if there was still time, the Illiad).
Got to have a foundation to that education in the bedrock of Western culture before you can layer on the contemporary literature. Otherwise students are lost (which I find is increasingly the case with students anyway — they have no sense of context within a tradition, just a scattering of little dots, and it is saddening — it is being lost in time).
After that Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit or Anne Carson sound nice.
We actually did read the Odyssey and Oedipus Rex in my high school!
I think it would be neat to have kids read some classic western canon text and then a contemporary book that comes out of that tradition, but takes it somewhere new.
Like, I don’t know. Have them read Medea, and then have them read Beloved.
yes, I read them in high school too. And they are great for teenagers! But it is a little scary how many people didn’t.
Yes, exactly. There are about a million matches for most of these books + contemporary lit because so much literature draws on them or comes out of them… and you can’t notice that if you haven’t read them first. I like your Medea/Beloved example. Hecuba/Beloved would be quite something, too.
LeGuin, specifically either The Dispossessed or The Left Hand of Darkness (which I read for the first time when I was 15 and I remember fervently wishing my teachers would assign something like it).
A lot of NK Jemisin’s books but specifically The Killing Moon because it draws a lot on Non-European mythologies and is unlike any other fantasy novel I’ve ever read. It would have totally blown my mind if I’d read it in high school.
I would have liked to have read either Save Me the Waltz or a Zelda Fitzgerald biography so that the kids can learn that Scott was a gaslighting plagiarist.
When a person says “you’ll hear about (News) by the end of the month,” do they mean “radio silence until the 30th” or “oh, it’s the 28th, let’s tell everybody, close enough?”
In my experience, it’s just the opposite of whichever option you were hoping for.
Too accurate.
Ughhh, that’s what it seems to be doing! At least I’m nervous enough that it makes me do my work in an attempt to trick Blind Io or Anoia or whomever to think I don’t actually care that much, just send the news already!
My immediate, negative-Nancy thought was, “They mean the first of the next month.”
I am cantankerous today.
Aaaaah I will be at the doctor’s at 9 am Wednesday – totes, please don’t sell out in 30 minutes!!
I’ll be on a plane until noon. Sigh.
Also everyone should read Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s Trumpfic: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/books/review/melania-t...
I think she wrote a queer Melania and I’m not sure how I feel about that tbh
It is so amazing. I was hooked from the Mrs. Dalloway ref she start with!
I am terrified yet intrigued.
“You need to get these fixed soon,” he had said a few months back, cupping her breasts, and when he got up from bed, she looked at his pale, slack belly, and the sprinkle of bristly hair on his back.”
This is just phenomenal! Though I am crying on the inside for poor CNA, who can channel the Donald with such fidelity. Ugh, wouldn’t want that all up in my axons.
Let’s hope it was just temporary and her brain has since been scrubbed clean of all Donald-like thoughts.
“He showed her his tweets after he had sent them, not before.” <—-that line pretty much sums up Trump.
bless you for bringing this to my attention
The Grey Lady just published RPF, no one can never complain about fanfic ever again.
Wow. That was amazing.
I died at “He copied and pasted his tweets to her in text messages.”
<3 <3 <3
ETA: I’m totally tweeting this and giving you credit for this gem of a find.
Going to read this later & have my face turn into a mask of horrified delight, thank you for bringing it to my attention
oh my GOSH. I am full of glee after that.
I’ve been away for a few days due to Being Bad At Job Interviews, so I apologize if this subject has been talked about to death, but I’m curious: how did y’all find The Toast? And what made you keep coming back?
I found it thanks to Hieu’s first piece about lifting. I stayed because of the awesome comment threads. 🙂
TNC! He linked to it when he was still writing frequently for the Atlantic. I have never looked back.
I found it through links on NPR given by Annalisa Quinn, and I looked around and decided this was a place for me.
I’m pretty sure I saw a link to an article on Tumblr, but I can’t remember what it was. I stayed for the commentariat. For me, Toasties are the Toast. Mallory et al. are fantastic, but y’all are The Toast to me.
Ditto! I think I came over here from the Hairpin? I know that whenever I did arrive I immediately just felt such a sense of “These are my people.”
Discovering (and then eventually participating in) the Toastie commentariat was definitely what transformed the Toast from “website I like that I read with some regularity” to “integral part of my soul.”
I was aware of it on the very first day it opened, but really got into it with the article Tell Me About Your First Fan Fiction. I must have commented on Toast articles before that, because I originally made this as a burner account (not wanting my general internet name to be associated with the content of my very first fan fic), but I started checking every day/most days from then onwards.
I was a fan of Nicole’s writing from the Hairpin days, so I followed her here.
Same, and I still miss the old Hairpin.
A facebook acquaintance shared “Women Listening To Men In Western Art History” and I was entranced immediately.
I don’t remember. But I have also been spending a lot of time Being Bad at Job Interviews lately and it’s really frustrating, so you have my sympathy/solidarity.
Someone on Jez (I *know*) linked to “A Day in the Life of a Troubled Male Protagonist” and I never looked back!
I was a Hairpinner first so when Nicole & Mallory started The Toast I was totally on board. I first discovered The Hairpin through people on my twitter timeline RT-ing articles. I…think Kate Beaton? I don’t recall which article first drew me in.
I think I can pinpoint my entry into the Hairpin at “Women Laughing Alone with Salad” being shared on Facebook, so I guess I have bad stock photography to thank for eventually finding The Toast!
I think I was first exposed to it through the “Two Monks Invent Things” series, but I didn’t start reading it regularly until I realized it was a project of the new Dear Prudence. (I’ve read that column pretty religiously since I was like 14, don’t ask why.)
I’m pretty sure it was via other people’s link round ups. A Practical Wedding, perhaps?
I found the-Toast when I read Normal Moments in Art History (http://the-toast.net/2014/06/16/fine-normal-moments-art-history-one-get-murdered/) and sent it to a good friend with “I feel like you could have written this” and he responded that that was a huge compliment and Mallory is hilarious.
I don’t remember what prompted me to read the comments (possible a deleted one on the LR?), but like so many others, the commentariat is what made the Toast the Toast. I nearly passed out the day CleverManka posted a .gif response to one of my comments ^_^
I believe that a friend linked a piece on Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, which is how I discovered both the Toast and Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. I read a couple more articles (I believe that Western Art History was my first “omg this is amazing” series), and then realized that not only were the articles themselves fantastic, but the comments were full of nerdy weirdos, and that I should make my home among them.
I was one of the Hairpinners who drifted over here. I used to try to read both sites but finally just stayed over here because this is where all the commenters went. A rather glorious commentariat indeed.
I really can’t remember. It’s like I just woke up one day and was a The Toast reader.
Same, I feel like there was just some sort of Internet chemotaxis that drew me in.
I don’t remember the first article I read – maybe something about Mad Max: Fury Road when it first came out? But I feel like I read a bunch of those “women enduring men in western art history” before I realized – lo! there was a comments section, and the commenters were actually NICE and SMART and discourse-y instead of being a flaming garbage fire like so many comment sections. That was the point at which the Toast became my go-to desk hour reading.
Sadly, I only discovered it in April, thanks to a link provided by an AV Club commenter to “The Order in Which I Would Kill the Characters in ‘And Then There Were None.'”
I’m already bereft. I just found it and it’s going away!
YEEEEAH GET THAT PORT OUT. WELL DONE NEW MOMMY.
Good morning! COTCHLING UPDATE:
–he is closer to one years old than three months old
–he is perfectly healthy, if a lil skinny
–he astonished the vet with his calmness; he purred all through getting his bloods drawn
–he is already neutered, which means
–he was someone’s, and either wandered off or was intentionally left
–his name is Admiral Sir Thomas Cochrane, KB, 10th Earl of Dundonald, which means
–he is called Toms, Tommy, Tommy Tum-Tum, etc
TOMMY TUM-TUM
He is perfect.
Excellent toebeans.
they’re variegated
That is the best cat name to ever ever.
The toe beans <3
Tommy Tum-Tum! I purr in your direction, you glorious beast.
THAT FACE.
*sending extra scritches, if you find yourself running low*
I like to think that when you’re not home, he’s posting on cat message boards about dressing up real fancy and cotching a nice human lady. But really, congrats! He seems so lovely!
Aw, that is such a lovely possibility to think about today.
Today he’d probably be posting about how he kept his new human dad up all night singing the songs of his people, which must have been the right choice since he got to stay in the bedroom (with bed for sleeps, couch for naps, and closet for explores and also sleeps) instead of the office, which just has boring boxes and a small cushion.
Omg, his little FEETS.
He doesn’t even mind them getting bothered! We clipped his toenails last night with very minimal fuss!
A prize cotch, if ever I saw one. May you have a long and contented life, Tommy Tum-Tum!
Tommy Tum Tum, what a wonderful name you have! I have a tshirt from my first age of sail fandom meetup that says “I am based on Lord Cochrane” with his portrait on it.
SQUOTCHLE!
Welp there goes my productivity for the day.
I suddenly can see why Garth asked if Wayne ever found Bugs Bunny attractive in a dress…
Well I guess I have some very interesting questions to ask myself now
Secretly convinced that this is why I became an opera singer. Who does not want to be Bugs Bunny as a super hot, man-owning Valkyrie with a giant pink and white horse??
Bugs Bunny Single Ladies-ing in a regency dress and bonnet! My day is made.
I feel like this gif is applicable to all aspects of my life.
Your new mommy is a literal superhero. Mazel tov to her!!!!
Oh good, I’ll issue my complaints here then.
LISTEN UP because there’s a bunch of kids in this daggone show I’m working on, they all just graduated high school, and I don’t think I understand Kids Today anymore. For one thing, they are all going to go to college together and major in Musical Theater and LOOK, I know that Musical Theater requires a lot of training and work, and I know that a lot of people like it and they have shows that they like and everything.
But Musical Theater feels like such a depressingly narrow field of art to study in, and it feels similarly like the one most thoroughly co-opted by commercial interests. Where do you even do it besides Broadway and places that are prepping shows to go to Broadway? And what are you going to work on besides the same sixteen revivals and maybe a Hamilton once in a blue moon? And what is it besides nice business and something “edgy” like Spring Awakening was “edgy”, edgy yeah but also blunted so that it can be comfortably sold to tourists?
I don’t know guys I don’t know.
(I want to tell them to at least major in history or literature or psychology or something, and minor in theater, because it’s easier for me to tolerate an actor with a rough singing voice than an actor who doesn’t know anything, except the technical demands for musical theater are so high I’m not sure that’s possible — but that only makes it worse for me, like are they going to spend four years specializing in only the skills meant to provide a clean, polished and technically perfect front to New York’s Theater Tourism industry? Ooof.)
I think you have just really succinctly summed up The Issue With Young Actors These Days (TM), which really truly springs from focusing so much on the technical skills of successfully making it on stage to the exclusion of all other things that they have no life experiences to draw from in performance and that is not a recipe for good performance.
Yeah like I don’t want to blame EVERY problem in the world on Late Stage Capitalism but this is TOTALLY problem with Late Stage Capitalism in which the commodification of work is so thorough that in order to participate in it you have to sacrifice the broad scope of your education, precisely so that we don’t get a bunch of actors who are also socialists.
For what it is worth, I have the same complaint about computer science majors when hiring. There’s even a prestigious university in town (Rice) that I just won’t hire from anymore because their comp sci grads have knowledge a mile deep and one inch wide, and that makes them terrible employees.
I have a type of engineering degree from a very small program that is only offered at one university. This degree is specifically focused on a well-rounded education with the aim of creating better communicators and more socially aware, and hopefully better, engineers. Let me tell you: it’s an additional year of schooling and no one hiring cares a hoot about it.
Thanks Dave for recognizing the value of breadth of knowledge. I wish other hiring managers did the same
We need to get kids back on the vaudeville circuit???
I don’t even know if I’m being serious or joking here???
It’s so much work to get the technical skills for even bit parts on Broadway and there are so few parts. Even with chorus members and swings, there can’t be more than 500 people employed as singers/dancers/actors on Broadway in a given year. What do you do when musicals are all you know how to do and the casting calls aren’t coming? (My actress cousin nannies, has 4 roommates in her Manhattan apartment, and does both off-Broadway and TV, but she wasn’t a musical theater major.)
Yeah I mean, I don’t like to talk about Job Market stuff when we’re talking about school, but jeez this is an awful lot of work for an awfully tight job market.
I was in voice performance, not theater, but I am really glad I got an English major and then went and got an education degree instead of a music degree like I was thinking about. My friends with voice degrees are mostly doing church gigs and waitressing or nannying. The guys (and it’s all guys) who got conducting degrees are doing slightly better.
My partner is an adjunct professor at one of the 2 or 3 top-rated music conservatories in the US, and (from what I hear) his students don’t know ANYTHING except how to play their instruments or sing.
For example, when he showed a film about Northern England, none of them knew who Margaret Thatcher was. And none of them had heard of the opera “La Boheme” (probably THE most famous opera ever!)
Basically, they act like they’re at a trade school and don’t read anything substantial about history, literature, etc., etc. (The conservatory is affiliated with a good university, so they certainly have the *opportunity* to take a wider range of classes).
This is why I just took a lot of theater classes while majoring in International and Intercultural Studies. I wanted to leave college knowing something about the world, dammit.
They also often don’t really have very good life skills.
They have the opportunity to take a wider range of classes, but I feel like it’s very hard to give them an incentive to? What I saw in my performing arts experience is that since it’s so competitive, every minute you spend doing something that’s not your trade is a minute that someone else out there is getting better than you. That pressure makes it really hard to justify time spent studying other things.
yeah a major problem with a lot of these programs (not conservatories, which are necessarily focused) is that you can take classes outside the department, but there’s a sort of over-riding culture that really discourages it.
(They’re also all aggressively wholesome, like, “oh I have a job singing for old people after work” and “oh I didn’t practice my lines because I was in church” and it’s like, I don’t know guys, get the shit out of here, you’re giving theater a bad (good) name.
oh my GOD no that’s not
NO
B A R F
AAAAAAHHHHHH
What kind of theatre kids are these? The ones I knew in uni were the oddest, highest, dirtbaggiest, sluttiest students! (aka my people)
Yeah my hope is that they’re just mistrustful of old people, and so when they talk to us it’s all “oh church church church, responsibilities responsibilities, &c.” Maybe they’re all secret dirtbags.
??? But you, too, are theatre people, no? Like, they don’t recognize kindred spirits when they see them?
Also, this may speak to a difference between Canada and the USA. People here tend to keep their churchiness to themselves, ime.
Well, it is a *community* theater production, which tends to have a disproportionately high number of adults who are also relentlessly square; in part I suspect that I am motivated by an anxiety that someone could look at me and think I was one of them.
I’m still hip! I’m cool! Check out my weird haircut!
Community anything seems to have a disproportionately high level of relentlessly square adults: see also the time my aunt tried to tempt me to her community group with “we approach the renters in our neighbourhood to let them know that shenanigans will NOT be tolerated and we WILL call the cops”. I laughed and told her I was more likely to be at the party than calling the cops, thanks 😉
IT ME + also lipstick of non-traditional colours.
But braak, you’re a parent now. That’s how those kids see you. Parent. No matter how weird your hair, or how cool you really are. Parent.
Of course, we here at The-Toast know and love your thoroughly cool weirdness.
oh jesus I’m a dad now I got to start wearing cargo shorts and a polo shirt I got to grow a mustache and have advice about lawn care oh god ohhhhhh noooooooo
Don’t forget to wear socks with your sandals.
And to wear a Tilley hat.
bad news, you are the old people they have a wholesome job working with after school
::looks in the mirror::
::the mustache is already here::
NOOOOOOOOOOO
What show are you doing?
A Midsummer Night’s Dream. For some reason I can’t understand, the director has barely cut a word from it and refuses to double up roles, and so we’ve got a cast of twenty-six, and like twenty of them are high school teens.
What’s your role in the show?
Bottom
The ones I knew in high school were definitely the girls who loved Disney and knew how to smile broadly and sing at the same time
Oh oh oh, so it is the difference between theatre and musical theatre, maybe? My uni didna have a big enough program to differentiate between them, i don’t think.
Thank you, this is exactly what I was coming to say. Musical Theater is Jesus Day Camp for a certain subset of wholesome, pretty, sweet girls who have no expectations for their intellect. They LOVE Legally Blonde and Jennifer Lopez Rom Coms. Their best friend is a closeted gay man, or their sister.
Legally Blonde is a goddamn masterpiece and I’ll not hear a word against it!
don’t know why but “get the shit out of here” is giving me endless giggles
Ugh. I graduated from high school with a group of girls like this. Most of a decade later they’re all either cashiers or Christian missionaries.
Make them do that “I hope I get it” number from Chorus Line 10x before breakfast, that’ll learn em.
They probably think it’s exaggerated for the sake of drama and certainly don’t relate it to their own situation any more than they relate to Les Mis or RENT. Hell, they probably relate more to RENT than “I Hope I Get It.”
Yeah that would make sense because I don’t think RENT really drives home how shitty it is to have to pay rent.
Fuck Mark Cohen. Be happy, kiddo, that you only have to do ONE SHITTY JOB to pay your rent (which everybody has to do; it’s not a personal tragedy of yours), rather than 3 spectacularly shitty jobs, so you can afford to gallumph around the East Village trying to exploit other peoples’ misery and poverty for your filmmaking.
And maybe do call your mother back and actually talk to her, and preferrably not like an insolent fuckboy, you cur.
Oh, whoah, good gravy!
I managed to completely miss the point of “What I did for love” for over a decade despite seeing A Chorus Line very frequently starting at age 11. I forget what I thought it was about, but it wasn’t until at least my 20s that I realized exactly how much DOOM was in it.
Yes, that show is a cautionary tale for everyone performing in it.
Look, it’ll all work itself out. The super talented/dedicated ones will be poor for awhile and either work regional theater and/or go to grad school, the not-as-willing-to-be-poor will go into theater administration, the rest will get real jobs or practical grad degrees once their parents are through funding their Rent dreams. And so it goes, and so it has been, for so it is written.
yeah I mean I know they’ll survive in life, people are good at surviving in life, I’m just depressed by the narrow scope of their artistic ambition
I don’t work in teaching anymore, but I do do various youth group-y things and I’ve had a much easier time of it since I’ve stopped viewing most of the things they say/think/want about the world as actually reflecting on their character, and started viewing it as basically a random sampling things fished out of youth culture.
“Oh… you want to grow up to write a book as good as Eragon. Interesting! I guess Eragon must be pretty popular, so you selected it at random. Nice to know!”
Key word being “about the world.” I still judge the heck out of them for how they treat each other, and the actual living people in their actual lives.
…of course, decisions like majors can have some pretty huge impacts and it’s pretty crappy that they have to make them when their best source of information about the world is said random sampling, but that’s more of a reflection on the system in general than them specifically. Maybe?
Hm, I’m starting to remember why I quit teaching.
Hahahah! Have you worked in arts administration? I guess you do get health insurance and the promise of a steady paycheck. Still pretty poor.
(Not laughing at you; laughing at my life choices.)
also “steady paycheck” is a comparative measure — they’ll definitely pay you every two weeks, as long as the theater stays open and as long as no one’s embezzled fifty grand out of the general fund and as long as the grants come in on time and as long as the artistic director didn’t decide to just fuck off this weekend and forget to sign all the paychecks before he left.
(guess which of these reasons have literally happened to me and stopped me from getting paid on time all of them it was all of them)
Yep. Too close to home.
“Only moderately wobbly” paycheck doesn’t have the same ring, though.
When I was an arts admin grad student I cost a couple of artists some money because I accidentally filled out their union contracts incorrectly. I felt awful about it and the error was reversed and they got paid, but at the same time, arts admin program, maybe don’t let student error be a factor in whether or not people get paid correctly?
I do indeed work in arts administration, and girl. It’s all relative, compared to “maybe I’ll get cast or maybe I’ll be waiting tables for the rest of my life and also I have six auditions in the next three hours.”
Truth!! And replying to your tale of union contract filling-out: man there is a lot of free labor happening on the admin side in that industry. Kind of illustrates why there’s a union in the first place! Not to mention that when they build theaters most often no one remembers, oh, someone’s got to RUN the thing. That’s why I have worked in an attic built above the wings.
Yes, it did not escape me that as a grad student I had to work filling out union contracts on Labor Day.
Well if you’re going to try to pursue a career in musical theater it’s kind of a prerequisite that you have a big ego and a (usually) naive evaluation of your own talents. If you don’t think that you personally are going to be the one who “makes it,” the girl who gets pulled out of the chorus and becomes Sutton Foster, it is a total waste of time and money. I love musical theater passionately but I realized very early in high school that my singing ability was only mediocre and that would never cut it in any professional setting. My best friend in high school, who is one of the most gifted singers I know, is pursuing music but getting a cs degree as well and doing software internships during the summer to make bank.
Musical theater does happen outside the Broadway track, and outside the Broadway range of aesthetics. An actress I follow on Twitter recently got together with a group of colleagues and they staged a four-week run of an original musical about spies that they funded on Kickstarter. The nonprofit Minnesota Children’s Theater does beautiful original musicals, and one of them went to Broadway once but that’s not what the institution is there for. There are always some weird musicals in our Fringe Festival. The choir I’m in staged a Gertrude Stein operetta earlier this year. Those aren’t all Equity jobs but they’re all paying jobs, doing pretty wildly different shows. If Musical Theater is an interdisciplinary major where you study voice and dance and acting, then it’s three times less narrow than majoring in one of those skills, which plenty of people do.
I don’t think anyone should major in any of those things either, because they’re technical skills, and I know a lot of people who’ve come out of conservatory programs with a frustratingly narrow range of education.
I went to conservatory for HS (ballet). My friends who danced professionally are starting to retire in their early thirties and just now getting a bachelor’s degree in order to start another career. It’s brutal.
yeah ballet is particularly bad in that sense because there’s almost no post-prime opportunities.
and also because you can really act haphazardly throughout high school and college and still have a reasonable base for building a career as an actor in your twenties and thirties, but I don’t think you can do that with ballet, if you don’t start pretty early and commit the first decades of your life to it, there’s not a lot of opportunity to get started at it later.
Misty Copeland started at 13, *wildly* late. With men you can fudge it a few more years. It is a young person’s pursuit. But I also had a teacher in her eighties who taught class with her oxygen tank on wheels, so you can always keep yelling “and a one and a two!”
I dunno dude, I love and passionately believe in the liberal arts but tons of people get a post-secondary education specifically to acquire technical skills. My cousin majored in Hotel Administration; a bunch of people go to the vocational-technical school in my hometown to study band instrument repair. I’m just saying that there’s life in musical theater outside the highly commercial stuff, and studying it is likely to expose you to more than just the musical theater repertory since you have to study each of the individual disciplines it includes.
And I am just saying that I know a lot of people who’ve been through post-secondary education in theater, including myself, and I’m comfortable saying that 100% of it is at least 50% horseshit, and if I never again have to deal with an actor who can sing a hundred octaves in a perfect Broadway(tm) voice, but gives me a vacant stare when I need to talk to him about the historic factors that governed 17th century performance aesthetics, it’ll be too soon.
I see where you’re coming from, but if I had to wind up as an admin in academia somewhere, I’d rather have done it with a degree in Musical Theater. I mean, Religious Studies was fine I suppose but if neither degree was gonna help me find a job, I’d have rather gone with the one that has singing, dancing, and set construction as part of the curriculum.
I think the people who are going to be interested in learning about the world around them are going to do that whether it’s in their major or not. And the ones who don’t, wont (whether it’s in their major or not).
I don’t know, I’m not sure about this. My experience with the environment of conservatory programs and even theater-focused majors at regular colleges is that it comes along with a culture of parochialism that encourages people to come at their education with a really narrow focus. There are definitely some people who are going to learn about the world no matter what (and believe me, I’ve got a short, short list of actors who I’ll work with who’ve been to conservatory and managed to learn something useful in spite of it), but I think there’s a depressingly large percentage who might have learned more and studied more broadly if they’d been in a program that encouraged it.
Brown’s playwriting MFA, for instance, only has I think two writing-focused classes per semester, and you’ve got to take at least two of your remaining classes from anywhere else in the school — I think this is a great example of how you can have a theater program that discourages parochialism, and also a great example of how you can have a program that genuinely produces better playwrights.
Speaking as someone who almost went to an acting conservatory but went to a liberal arts school instead for exactly the reasons you support liberal arts education: this comment strikes me as unnecessarily judgmental! People have different aptitudes and different wants and different priorities in life, and that’s not only okay, but great–rich tapestry, and all that.
Also, my experience having gone to a liberal arts school and not a conservatory/BFA: it’s SO much harder to get work than for my peers who went the conservatory route! Possible? Yes, but way, way, way harder, and way harder to get an agent/get work that actually pays, even in a non-New York market. If I had kids who wanted to be actors, I would feel hesitant about recommending a conservatory because I’d want my kids to keep learning, but hesitant about encouraging them to go liberal arts if they actually want to be actors because it makes things so much harder once you’re out of school.
Also, I think we’re in second golden age of musical theatre–there’s so much interesting, boundary-pushing stuff happening, and that’s not even including Hamilton.
I think Kids These Days [TM] get a lot of advice from almost every angle that Higher Education is all about Gaining A Skillset and Preparing For A Career. Anything that might make you A Well-Rounded CItizen and Scholar is wasteful and time that could have been used to better prepare for that career. So Pick A Career, Any Career, and pursue it with single-minded abandon.
And then you get college administrators who want to Run The University Like A Business and suddenly you’re hearing bullshit proposals such as prorating professor pay based on enrollment, “exploring dramatically relationships with new corporations for research,” and “continuing to look for new sources of revenue.”
Sorry sorry sorry my state’s flagship public university has a shithole dirtbag President and I have some feels about him and his dirtbag approaches to universitying.
I am in denial. I couldn’t read all comments on The Toast to the Toast post yesterday, let alone contribute. This website has meant so much to me in the 9+ months since I stopped lurking, but articulating all of that means that it is really going away. I don’t want to miss my chance to tell all of you and the editors how much you mean to me, BUT i just can’t ball up and write something!
I haven’t even been able to read that article yet because I know it will make me cry.
Same. I saw it in my RSS reader but couldn’t bring myself to click it.
Same. But they know. They know everything.
Today in (Feminist) History! [Archive]
On this day in 1889 was the death of Maria Mitchell, the first American woman to be a professional astronomer, known for discovering a comet later named “Miss Mitchell’s Comet”. She was born in 1818 in Nantucket, Massachusetts, a distant cousin (first cousin, four times removed) of Benjamin Franklin. Her parents were Quakers, and she and her nine brothers and sisters were raised in a community that placed value on education equally for both boys and girls. Living as they did in a whaling port town, women of the area were also far more independent in general, due to the need to run their homes and manage all their family and business affairs while their sailor husbands were at sea for months.
Maria was educated first at a local school where her father was principal, and then at his own school where she was also a teaching assistant. It was her father that taught her to use his telescope; the two of them enjoyed astronomy together, and it was him at the age of 12 ½ that they calculated the exact moment of an annular eclipse. After her father’s school closed, she attended a school for young ladies and then eventually opened her own school in 1835. Unlike the local segregated public school, Maria controversially opened her own school to all children, regardless of race. A year later she took a job as the Nantucket Atheneum’s first librarian, and she worked there for 20 years, until 1856.
King Frederick VI of Denmark had previously established the awarding of gold medals to anyone who discovered a “telescopic comet”, aka a comet too distant and dim to be scene with only the naked eye. On October 1, 1847. Maria spotted a comet that would allow her claim one of those medals for herself; named “Miss Mitchell’s Comet” or C/1847 T1. There was a brief period of unsurity over who had discovered the comet first, however it was soon resolved that though Francesco de Vico had reported it to European authorities first, he had actually seen it two days after Maria. In 1848, the new King Christian VIII awarded Maria her medal, and she became famous worldwide, especially since only two women astronomers (Caroline Hershel and Maria Margarethe Kirch) had discovered comets before her.
Following her discovery, Maria became the first woman elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1848), Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1850), and one of the first women elected to the American Philosophical Society (1869, along with Mary Somerville and Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz). She went on to work for some time at the U.S. Nautical Almanac Office (calculating tables of positions of Venus), and became professor of astronomy and later Director of the Observatory at Vassar College. It was after several years of teaching there that Maria realized her salary was lower that numerous male professors who were younger and less experienced than her. She protested, insisted on a salary increase… and got it.
Maria was also friends with several well-known suffragists (like Elizabeth Cady Stanton), and was an abolitionist who stopped wearing cotton clothing in protest of slavery and plantations. She also co-founded the American Association for the Advancement of Women. She never married, and eventually retired from Vassar in 1888 to live with her sister Kate and family in Lynn, Massachusetts. She died there in 1889 at the age of 70, but was honored in numerous ways, including the naming of the Maria Mitchell Observatory in Nantucket, the SS Maria Mitchell (a WW2 Liberty ship), and a train on the NY Metro North railroad named The Maria Mitchell Comet. She was also posthumously inducted into the U.S. National Women’s Hall of Fame.
BRB sending this one to the Burgomaster.
1. My dad is doing better! He should be in the hospital for another week or so, and then he’ll need several weeks at a rehab facility because he will need 24/7 involved care for a while. If we can scrape the money together we’ll all go out to Oregon next month (I’d prefer to ALL go, because I have family members there who still haven’t even met my youngest, and she is FIVE). If we can’t, then probably just I will go for a week or so.
2. I feel a lot of things about The Toast closing, but am having trouble putting them all into words.
3. Our new babysitter is a music/environmental studies major and opera singer who FLIPPED when 5yo asked for Hamilton. We all had a Hamilton singalong. She’s never heard of The Toast, but I think we’ll get along just fine.
4. I’m going to be editing at Catapult on a part-time basis, hopefully several pieces a month, and I’m so glad. I honestly don’t know what I’d do if I could not work with writers anymore. If you want to pitch me an essay, you can use my non-Toast email: nicole.soojung at gmail
I’m so glad your dad is doing better, Nikki!
Super news about your dad. And A+ babysitter pick, too, it sounds like!
omg I’m so glad we found someone for the summer. It’s always hard to find someone good, part-time, who’s good with autistic kids (our sitter has a brother on the spectrum and babysits for lots of neuroatypical kids). She’s going to college in the fall, though, so we still need to find someone for the schoolyear.
*hearteyes* babysitter! That’s excellent. Hopefully it’s a domino effect, now you’ve found her, others will fall into place. She’s like the key to the Awesome Babysitters Club, and your kids asking for Hamilton is the WD-40 of getting her to turn the lock.
(That metaphor may have gotten away with me a little.)
Glad to hear your dad’s doing better! And I can’t wait to keep following your work at Catapult- The Toast has done many great things for me, and one of them is introducing me to so many other beautiful areas of the internet.
That’s great news about your dad! I really hope you can all go.
Sending continued healing thoughts to your dad, and supportive thoughts to you. I’m so glad to hear he’s on the mend.
<<<<<<333333
I’m so glad about your dad and that you’ll still be editing!
Great news about your dad! And congrats on the babysitter!
Related to Nicole’s piece about South East Ontario gossip, my hometown recently featured a two-liner beat about police called to break up a dispute between two fishermen on a bridge because their lines got tangled. Bless.
*hearteyes*
That is delightfully Stars Hollow-esque.
I SAT ON A TOILET AND THE SEAT BROKE. My butt is a destructive force. That is all.
I was at an air show Saturday and my camp chair just straight up ripped underneath me and I fell on my ass. My dad very nicely said that I had damaged the chair by leaving it in the blazing sun for a whole summer and the nylon was weak, but there were definitely multiple people laughing at me. Ah well.
I recently sat on a brand new, wooden (!) IKEA chair at the coworking office and one of the slats just plain broke under me. It wasn’t like I smashed my butt onto that chair. I sat down. Like a person. I mean, yes, IKEA… but that thing looked sturdy! It’s like my butt bone karate chopped that slat in the chair.
butt karate is a GREAT superpower though
Good point! Also, doesn’t sound too exhausting since, essentially, I’ll just be sitting on stuff. That’s a superpower to my liking.
Those IKEA chairs just do that sometimes. I know exactly the ones you mean – I used to manage a touring circus production that mainly used those chairs for audience members, and every few shows one would just break. They even sometimes broke when the cast members sat in them!
This happened to a person at the restaurant I worked for for a decade. She told us, and we all felt so badly. Not like “bitch broke the seat”, but “OMG, what a humiliating thing to have to tell a stranger, thank you so much”.
I once broke a porch swing with my butt. Turns out jumping on them butt first is not a good idea. But also why put a porch swing above average butt height!?
Am I the only person who has to tighten the screws on their toilet seat like, once a week? I’ve broken a couple – I don’t flop or anything, I think I’m just… enthusiastic?
My toilet seat is wobbly right now, and I don’t know why it didn’t even occur to me to just tighten the dang screws. Probably because that means I need to get my hands close to the rim of grossness. But I should do it.
I have to do this regularly, but I think it’s because my maintenance dude gave me a toilet seat that doesn’t quite match the toilet in terms of screw size/pitch or something. It technically fits, but it’s temperamental.
Pre-nibbled by rats? Just saying.
Okay I SUPPOSE you’re allowed to give me nightmares in return for me giving you nightmares, that is fair. It was indeed the same toilet.
That one’s just cursed. Rip it out and start over.
I can’t keep a toilet seat unbroken on one toilet in my house, to the point where I have started blaming the toilet itself.
With great power comes great responsibility. Use your butt wisely.
Oh, hey! An Open Thread! Going to take this opportunity to ask Toronto toasties for restaurant recs again, this kinda got buried last Friday. I’m visiting Toronto for business purposes and would love to hear about good vegetarian restaurants or cute cafes within walking distance of downtown, if you have any recs!
Also, what has everyone been cooking lately? I got two pints of the most beautiful, gem-like stawberries and a bunch of mizuna (which I’d never tried before) at the farmer’s market and had myself A Weekend. Salads, shortcake, and pesto!
I stalked the farmer’s markets and acquired four precious quarts of sour cherries. They will be pitted and frozen for now, but they’re going in pies and jam.
When I was visiting and asking for recs some people mentioned Fresh (I think that was the name) vegetarian restaurants, there’s a few in Toronto. If you like Ethiopian food and don’t mind eating with your hands the veggie special in Nazareth on Bloor St West is really something.
+1 Nazareth
Fresh is delicious, as someone has already mentioned. If you’re feeling for Chinese food, I’d head over to King’s Cafe in Kensington Market.
Ooh I’m looking at the Fresh menu and I’m super into it.
I wanted to make pesto recently but Sainsburys was out of pine nuts for several weeks straight!
I’m making a big batch of cupcakes on Friday because my street is having a street party on Saturday to celebrate 200 years since it was built. Does anyone have any simple delicious recipes? I’ve got some go-tos but always up for something new! I don’t have tonnes of time or money though, hence the request for something simple.
I always use walnuts or pecans in my pesto, which admittedly does make a chunkier pesto, but costs like, half as much. Ditto basil vs. whatever green I have in my crisper.
Trying to think of a good cupcake recipe, but it has honestly been years since I’ve made a cupcake! I’m not so much a great baker. Sounds like it will be a fun party!
The Loving Hut in Toronto is absolutely fantastic! For pretty much all the ideas, I recommend HappyCow.net.
Parts & Labour is rad. The chef is kind of a Vice food channel celebrity (Matty Matheson) and he’s a total card.
If you’re willing to hop on a west-bound streetcar, check out Cardinal Rule. Queer owned, good veg food, nice little neighbourhood place.
I was out of town visiting the glorious Twin Cities for the past six days and also living in active denial that this is the last week of The Toast. Now I’m back at work in a place that is not a permanent, root-growing kind of place and all the more aware that I want to leave it behind and move to the North (partially so I can adopt a Game of Thrones northern accent). And The Toast is ending. I’m so grateful for this place and I’m so happy to be part of Toastie Twitter and the Slack group and to have been here for these past three years…and I know my feelings of loss and mourning are not unique, but they are real! I can’t wait to see what comes next for everyone that has been part of this wonderful place. So thank you, again. Thank you. Thank you.
Who do I beg to get put in Toastie Slack? I can’t handle only getting to follow conversations in horrible public with no Hammer of Doom.
DAY TWO of the final week… glad for the open thread. A low-stakes question just for funsies: if you were to write a Dirtbag treatment of some literary/historical/whatever personage, who would you pick and what might you say? Keep my day dirtbaggy, kids, because I don’t want to do ANY WORK AT ALL.
I would say Andrew Jackson, but then it would just be a list of all the things he did/said. No one can make him sound worse than he did himself. I am going with Jack Kerouac, because he was the literal worst but gets held up as being so “deep”. The way all his characters think it is hilarious to be tourists in the lives of actually disenfranchised people whilst they wire home for money is so, so grating.
Oh I think we could do a whole dirtbag beat scene set in a Columbia dorm room and it would be glorious.
I think I would love to see a Dirtbag Cleopatra. Bonus that Mark Antony would make a stellar dirtbag too.
Odysseus. How is there not a dirtbag Odysseus?? (there isn’t right, I haven’t missed it??)
Dirtbag Queen Elizabeth I
Dirtbag Wordsworth.
“Coleridge, I really think you should give up poetry and focus on telling me what a great guy I am all the time.”
“Dorothy, are you writing all this down? I may need to put my observations into a poem later!”
“Annette, it’s been real, but continue the Revolution without me, kthxbai.”
Dirtbag Napoleon. He wasn’t actually that short–he was about 5’6. So I’d like to show that he was purely a pompous nutcase and there was no short guy complex to blame it on.
Per Wikipedia “He cheated at cards, but repaid the losses; he had to win at everything he attempted.” So I think this writes itself. Also, I had a friend in HS who used to joke that Napoleon always had his hand in his jacket because he kept Twinkies in there, so Twinkies would be worked in, anachronism be damned.
Dirtbag Catherine the Great. Catherine the Dirtbag.
Dirtbag Dumbledore!
Dirtbag RONBLEDORE, you mean
Dirtbag Charles V, Dirtbag Martin Luther, Dirtbag St. Augustine (a dirtbag irl)
My sister and my mom have gotten hardcore into genealogy and our family history and their most recent discovery is that we are descended from a legit Salem witch (I mean obviously she wasn’t a witch, magic isn’t real, she confessed to get her own daughter off the hook and it was tragic but WITCHES). She even has her own Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Foster
Oooh, you would totally enjoy the Who Do You Think You Are episode with Scott Foley, I think! I ain’t spoilering!
Wow! She was clearly too witches for this world. But in seriousness, that’s so SAD about her daughter and granddaughter, who were probably also tortured or threatened. Poor ladies. They must have had so much guilt afterwards.
For all the public librarians Toasties out there, a close relative of mine is still dealing with library board shenanigans. They “casually” implicated her for timesheet fraud during caucus and have just requested that she sign an employee contract (she’s been there 15+ years and has never been required to do so).
They were reviewed for pay equity, and after THREE rounds with the same dumb lawyer, she’s finally told she’s owed money. Sooo the board decided the township can’t pay her out, and as such, will be cutting her hours/the library’s (already short) hours to be able to do so. She really feels like they’re trying to pull a fast one over her, so she’s meeting with a labour lawyer to get her ducks in a row and coming for them for harassment (long history) and all this. Oh, she’s the CEO, if that helps.
Any experience with this sort of nonsense?
No experience! But tons of sympathy. I’ve heard of several librarians getting “phased out” in really manipulative and probably illegal ways. I hope she can find a better place to work, or branch out into consulting and public speaking; that sounds stupid toxic.
And I meant to link you to this but momentarily forgot the specifics, but then a friend came through: http://lj.libraryjournal.com/blogs/annoyedlibrari…
Hello! I am suffering from some severe heartbreak. What’s your favorite break-up song?
the entire “Blue” album by Joni Mitchell on repeat.
“Does Not Suffice” by Joanna Newsom
Seconded. This song was on repeat in my head as I packed all of my silks, jacquards and cashmeres out of my last shared closed.
“A Letter to Elise” by the Cure
Courtney Barnett, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit.
Oh I’m so sorry! I love Susanna and the Magical Orchestra’s cover of “Love Will Tear Us Apart”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHhVydgvuAc.
so beautiful! but I’m still at the angry stage
Then allow me to suggest “Funny Time of Year” by Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man:� �https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xXHg-UFiEE. I’m not sure that it’s about a breakup, but I always found the end quite comforting in its anger.
HOOOO then Blood Orange – You’re Not Good Enough
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gtdpnKbT10
I actually have a whole angry playlist from when I was unceremoniously dumped by a total goon last year (I had to dig so deep into my playlists to find it, which was gratifying). It’s definitely a good combo of channelling your rage/feeling righteous in your anger. Great to angrily run to, or vengefully delete digital evidence of the relationship to, or throw away relationship mementos to. Goodluck, godspeed. The feeling at the other end of heartbreak is a good one.
Following Blood Orange is:
I Don’t Fuck With You – Big Sean, E-40
Nothing More to Say – Sophie
Thank Me Now – Drake
I’m Out – Ciara, Nicki Minaj
Appletree – Erykah Badu
You Think You’re Tough – Hunx & His Punx
6’1″ – Liz Phair
Wish You Would (feat. Princess Nokia) – Mykki Blanco
I am a fellow scorpio, and I feel like you really GET me. List on, soul sister.
And it probably goes without saying but No Children is helpful https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRP6egIEABk
“No Children” by the Mountain Goats, in rotation with about half the Magnetic Fields’ “69 Love Songs.”
“No Children” is the alpha and omega of breakup songs.
I just broke up with my boyfriend and have been playing It’s Alright Girl by J.J. Jackson on repeat.
Get Me Away From Here I’m Dying by Belle & Sebastian, and All The Pretty Girls by fun. were both in heavy rotation after my last breakup, followed by a healing period of listening to the album The Life of the World to Come by the Mountain Goats. Basically, once you’ve cried as much as you want to cry, apply Mountain Goats liberally until everything has taken on a different light.
Also sending you Toast hugs!
All of the Michelle Branch album with “Goodbye to You” on it. This is obviously Buffy-influenced.
Also adding to the Mountain Goats chorus, specifically “Cotton.”
aw, we saw some good shows at The Bronze
This was my first CD! Such great memories of rocking out to “Sweet Misery” with my Discman on the bus
I just listen to The Cure’s “Disintergration” in it’s entirety and have a good cry.
All of “69 Love Songs,” and the breakups episode of This American Life–there’s a whole segment about writing the perfect breakup song.
Regina Spektor, “Apres Moi”
Beyoncé, “Irreplaceable”
Elle Varner, “Fuck You”
Ciara, “I’m Out”
I do love Beck’s album Sea Change, but I am currently in the anger phase of my breakup and have banned men.
Strength to your sword arm, Honeybunchoats.
Ban All Men
I want to add large swaths of Lemonade.
If you are listening to some men, Stromae has some good breakup songs– “Tous Les Mêmes” for one is beautiful and hostile, and the choreography is awesome.
I like to imagine that my ex is wandering around in the (nonexistent) slurring “Formidable,” which is the catchiest song about abjection and melting down I’ve ever heard.
Another good Beyonce song for the angry phase of a break-up: Best Thing I Never Had.
My go to is the entire Nikki Nack album from tUnE-YaRdS for heartaches because it’s so catchy it will drown out all the thoughts if you want it to. Real Thing makes me feel powerful in my own skin which is a good thing if you’ve been shaken out of yourself.
Sending good energy to your heart <3
Breaking Up by Rilo Kiley
Don’t Speak by No Doubt
<3
Many that have already been mentioned, plus Dixie Chicks, “Am I the Only One”; Dolly Parton, “Why’d You Come In Here Lookin’ Like That”; Dar Williams, “As Cool As I Am”; various Sleater Kinney; the angrier Ani DiFranco
ETA: And Beyonce’s “Freedom,” esp as performed at the BET awards, holy shit.
This is very 90s of me, but Ani Difranco’s ‘Untouchable Face’ and ‘Swim’ are excellent for turning heartbreak into righteous anger.
Yes! “Untouchable Face” and “Gravel” were two I was thinking of.
“I Love Myself Today” by Bif Naked
Aaaaaaaaah, also Tango Shoes! ♪they’re gonna help me dance away from you♪
Stars’ “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead”
Yes, I love this one! Can’t wait to get to this point -> “And all of the time you thought I was sad, I was trying to remember your name”
Greg Laswell’s “Farewell” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WE4t48V1PVY
Madeleine Peyroux’s cover of “Between the Bars” because it is perfectly bleak and sometimes you need to wallow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCLtci0WdlY
And Ashley Monroe’s “I Buried Your Love Alive” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYeOw0ziAGA
I have a feeling I’m just gonna keep coming back to this thread with suggestions all day.
All Dogs’ album Kicking Every Day has seen me through some touch times. Especially the song “Black Hole” – nothing better than hearing “I am a black hole/and everything I touch turns to dust” when you are feeling like a dried out husk of a human. https://alldogs.bandcamp.com/album/kicking-every-…
Also, Waxahatchee is so good for this. Ivy Tripp and Cerulean Salt both are just break-up/heartbreak/overcomin’ it perfection.
You are quite possibly not at the stage yet for this to be a great break up song, but I have been listening to “Hell No” by Ingrid Michaelson a WHOLE BUNCH this summer and it is an extremely satisfying song to scream along to.
For when you get to that sort of ‘I feel so bad it’s ridiculous, let’s dance/exercise/strut through the pain’ part, ABBA.
(cut to me 18 months ago aggressively working out to ‘Waterloo’)
I love all of Make Her Purr by Dance Hall Crashers – not all great breakup songs, but enough of them are that i, when i found it, thought “if i had knows about DHC when I was heartbroken, I would never ever have loved Sarah McLaughlan like I did”. (o look, here it is! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZjSUswDdYk)
This song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJye3pEuFO0 (careful – this still makes me frigging cry, and it has been over a decade since I was heartbroken)
“Record Year for Rainfall” by The Decemberists.
also pretty much anything by Chris Pureka (but especially “Burning Bridges”)
Hugs to you.
Ingrid Michaelson’s “Starting Now” for when it’s really raw and “Oh What a Day” for when you want to be optimistic.
And “Time Machine” for when you’re like WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY did I date that dickfuck????????????????????
I recently fell in love with Lindi Ortega’s “Hard As This”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fir6bOjnecQ
Also, Miranda Lambert’s “Mama’s Broken Heart”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yg05svXp98
Since you are in deep misandry, only women (I totally made a playlist for this during my divorce).
Katell Keineg, “Franklin”
Doubleclicks, “Godzilla” (There’s nothing wrong with me, you just broke my heart.)
Lucinda Williams, “Joy”
First Aid Kit, “Heaven Knows”
Emmylou Harris, “Boy From Tupelo”
Pink, “So What”
Beyonce, “Hurt Yourself”
Neko Case, “Thanks a lot”
“Not About You” by Jonathan Coulton
“WASTED” by Kuroki Meisa
Kylie Minogue’s “Aphrodite” album for when I want to feel better
“Goodbye Earl” “Sin Wagon” (Dixie Chicks) “Respect Yourself” (A. Franklin) “Express Yourself” (Madonna)
I naturally assumed that your heartbreak is referring to a personal break-up, then realized you could theoretically be cleverly referring to Toast heartbreak, and that all of these songs are probably equally good for either situation.
these are mostly sad heartbreak songs rather than angry ones, so it depends on your mood
“Manhattan” – Sara Bareilles/all of The Blessed Unrest
“Almost Lover” – A Fine Frenzy
“Woke Up New” – The Mountain Goats
“You Never Wanted Me” – Jackson C. Frank
“Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” – Bob Dylan
“If You Go” – Javier Dunn & Sara Bareilles
Echoing the 69 Love Songs – especially “I Don’t Want to Get Over You” and “How to Say Goodbye”
“No Children,” The Mountain Goats, for your crying phase.
“Tous Les Mêmes,” Stromae, to move into rage.
The entirety of “Lemonade,” Beyoncé, to move into Full Misandry.
This got me over a four-year relationship, I do not doubt but that it will help you.
Hey I had a fun kinky threesome yesterday and it was great, just thought I’d let you all know.
How do you set these things up? I feel like threesomes are like urban legends- everyone knows someone’s sister’s cousin who insists it’s Totally A Thing, but it never happens in my life. *goes and pouts*
I was going through profiles on Fetlife and found that of the woman in this couple. I don’t usually pay much attention to ‘We’re looking for a hot lady third for our threesome’ but she seemed cool and our kinks aligned – and also they weren’t actually particular about gender which is a different matter to ‘my boyfriend wants to bang two chicks at once’ which is what most threesome requests boil down to.
I started messaging her, met her one-one-one, then later met up with both of them and we all liked each other – voila. But yeah, it’s not a thing that just ‘happens’, if you want one then the internet is your weird creepy friend here.
That is very helpful! Thank you 🙂
The threesomes I’ve had were because I was seeing two men simultaneously and they were like “welp this seems as good a time as any.” So … I hope that helps? Never had a threesome with another lady.
This is some impressive partner picking. Is there a secret to it?
My first threesome was because I was attending a kink convention with friends. Two of us had hooked up earlier in the day, and then another came back to their room, and, well, one thing led to another… That’s pretty much the only spontaneous threesome I’ve ever had, though. I have since had threesomes and foursomes with those lovely people by emailing each other “So…games night this Friday?”
My favorite threesome ever was organized between two of my current partners. Although they’d heard of each other and had several mutual friends, they hadn’t met when I first suggested in a wistful voice to each of them that they would be great co-tops. Then they met, got on like a house on fire, and told me they were in. I sent them a list of what I definitely wanted and didn’t want, and they met ahead of time to conspire. (They tell me there are flowcharts of their schemes, which they won’t let me see in case we’re all in the same city again and get to reprise this scene. I love my beautiful nerds.) We got a hotel room for not-bothering-housemates purposes. It was easily one of my most memorable and enjoyable sexcapades ever.
So I guess go to kink conventions and/or date cool people who are into group sex?
I’ve just found that being super honest and direct in asking for what you want really gets you far. Mine have all been with friends or acquaintances, and they’ve pretty much all happened because we floated the idea past! Things have never gotten weird because we’re always up front and honest about it. And a touch of humour helps. On my husband’s last birthday, a girlfriend was sort of lingering around at the end and I said “so…. want to help me suck this guy’s dick?” We laughed, she laughed, and we skipped merrily to the bedroom.
Most recent sexcapade was a foursome with husband, roommate and our mutual best friend, and we just all thought it would be a fun bucket list thing to do after joking through a few months of sexual tension. We picked a night, made a light meal (steak salad, which is now our code phrase to make each other all giggle), drank a bottle of champagne, and then just awkwardly got down to business. Best of luck!!
I want to thumbs-up this comment but right now there are 69 thumbs-ups and I am reluctant to Disturb such Perfection.
Anyway, that sounds like excellent fun and I am glad you had a good time!
Yay! Go you!!! Fun to look back and get little shivers of all the great things that happened.
I put on a new outfit (navy & white dots! bright yellow shoes!) today and looked in the mirror with real satisfaction (a rarity). Then as I was leaving the house, I realized I should have saved it for Thursday to wear to my local Toast Wake. Instead I have wasted it on endless data-gathering in my office, where no one of real importance will see me.
I for one would not judge you for wearing it twice!
But now we all know you are wearing it and think you sound awesome! Go you!
(Goes to find sime bright yellow shoes….)
I guess the wear-it-agains have it!
BTW: http://www.ninewest.com/Christee-Ballet-Flats/305…
Wear it again,today’s just a trial run. I bought a new sweater this weekend that I’m saving for my Toast Wake on Friday. Doo ittt!
Oh man, I’m having trouble accepting that the rest of the internet is not like The Toast. I read Madame Clairvoyant’s (amazing) new horoscopes on The Cut. When I went down to the comments to revel in the positive vibes, all there was was people bitching about the lack of gifs. Seriously. I love everything about The Toast but *Dorothy voice* I think I’ll miss you most of all, commentariat.
that was so depressing….
Ask Polly’s move from The Hairpin to The Cut was the same Preview of Feelings of Toastlessness, for me. I love Heather Havrilesky’s deal in a big way, but instead of kind and generous sharing in the comments, there are just people complaining that her advice is too long (when they aren’t dog-piling on the LW for being a terrible human or giving some heartless BOOTSTRAPS, BITCH counter-advice). All my rosy feelings about humanity were just… smashed.
:(((( this is so sad
Noooooooo Madame Clairvoyant is fundamentally incompatible with gifs. Unless they’re gifs of soothing clouds or something.
Oh, their previous astrology column was gif-based. I get it, change is hard for everyone.
I’m so glad you mentioned that Madame Clairvoyant had new horoscopes up; I immediately went and read mine and am now tearing up (as per usual). Thanks also for the heads up not to read the comments, gotta start reminding myself of that again now that I’ll be venturing outside of the toast on a regular basis again.
ALL COMMENTS SHOULD BE MODERATED. Moderated comments have been the quietly gleaming jewel in the crown of the Toast.
Yeah, I feel like I’m going to do a lot of not-comment-reading for a while. I wonder if this is a function that ToastCrumbs subreddit and Toast slack can provide: a good venue for community discussion.
Anyways, from the part for capricorns:
The world might not always see the golden wildness in you, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. The world might not recognize your bright, electric courage, but you can see it in yourself, when you pay attention. …Remember what it looks like — your truest, strangest self — and hold on to this vision. Carry it with you. Your eyes are bright and your vision is clear. This week, you can do anything.
I feel this in my very bones, and want to weep with joy.
Fellow Cap here, me too.
So, yesterday I go to the twitters where everyone is discussing the amazing speech Jesse Williams gave on BET recently, and I see a tweet from Mr.Table about how Jesse Williams is the new contender for favorite high school classmate.
I thought maybe I was confused, or maybe he was confused. Nope. No, Mr. Table went to high school with Jesse Williams and I am just finding this out now.
(in sort of similar news, I went to high school with someone who is now in the pit at Hamilton, but I went to a much bigger high school and I didn’t have any interaction that I can remember with the person now working on Hamilton, and he only very recently became a Person Of Interest, Mr. Table’s high school was much smaller, he had classes with Jesse Williams, and just didn’t realize that Jesse Williams was that Jesse Williams, more similar to when I didn’t realize that Jess Zimmerman was that Jess Zimmerman.)
Edit to ask: Who did YOU go to high school with?
I went to high school with the woman who Anthony Wiener famously “accidentally” sent a twitter dick pic to. It was unsolicited and she is lovely.
I find these things more interesting than the celeb connections, honestly. Give me more obscure stories about not-really-famous people!
I went to school with a guy who wound up on Real World. Nowhere near as cool as Jesse Williams.
I went to high school with a couple of writers on the internet, but what’s COOLER is that the creator of the slinky went to my high school.
I am the best person from my high school!
(JK, that’s a total lie. I’m like 7th best.)
They didn’t go to my high school because they went to private school, but Bode Miller and his younger brother Chelone (RIP) are from my home town area.
In our high school, there was this one guy who was famously incredible in theater. I did not know him personally, but he was basically well-known for being great in any play he was in. Fast forward a few years, where I recognize the name Jared Padalecki when he shows up on Gilmore Girls, and now Supernatural. Way to go Jared, way to go.
I went to high school with a girl who is now a Grammy-nominated, moderately-successful R&B singer. I am happy to see her do well, but I confess that did not have a high opinion of her intelligence (or her personality) when we were in school.
No one famous from high school, but I was in a college acting class with John Krasinski. And also Stephan Karam, who just won a Tony!
I did not go on to be a famous actor/playwright; pretty sure they would not remember who I am.
oh man I missed going to college with Lupita Nyong’o by a semester
one of my friends is deeply saddened he didn’t overlap with Danny Tamberelli.
oh shit, little Pete! I did overlap with him, but I never met him and also had never watched that show so I didn’t know who he was, I only knew that he was in one of the dorms or something.
I was in grad school with Lupita yaaaaay me. And also, as it was a theater school, the entire single-episode cast of any recent season of Law and Order. They can’t all be Lupitas.
oh yeah “a theater school”, just one of your regular old theater graduate schools, nothing to see here
IT WAS YALE SCHOOL OF DRAMA OKAY? YES I’M AN IVY-LEAGUE CERTIFIED DRAMA QUEEN.
Likewise, nobody famous from high school, but I went to college with, and took several classes with, Jonathan Franzen. His subsequent adventures have provided me with hours of bitter amusement.
I would like to hear your stories.
(buys you a beer) Tell me more!
I don’t have much in the way of stories, because we weren’t friends; more in the way of observations. A of All, he really is very intelligent and well-read, in the late-20th-century Literary sense. I look back at seminar papers he wrote and where my papers in those classes are clearly written by a teenager, his are written by an adult. At the same time, I am not at all surprised by his general cultural tone-deafness. What I do find interesting is how his first wife seems to be written out of the overall Jonathan Franzen Story, because in my recollection (admittedly colored by temporal distance and acid dreams), she was considered the brighter and more talented of the two, and he grabbing on to her coattails.
High school: Olivia Wilde. College: JTT. Shared classes with neither, but an English teacher with one.
Was in the band with a girl who is now possibly a news anchor in Atlanta? It’s been a while since news of her crossed my path but I think that’s the current status.
Regina King. Except I expect that by the time I got to the school she was probably never actually on campus since she was busy doing 227. I never saw her, but she’s all over the yearbook.
Total flashback to all the people I knew who tried to make Jackee Harry’s deadpan “Oh, Mary” a Thing, with extremely limited success.
nobody. a BUNCH of nobodies
I went to high school (in the midwest) with a number of mid-successful Broadway actors. Also Jared Fogle of Subway and child pornography infamy.
I too went to school (but in California) with a mid-successful Broadway actor! He’s a lovely person and we all knew he was destined for success.
And Wikipedia says LeVar Burton went to my high school (before I was there) but I seriously doubt that because I knew people who had taught there since the ’70s and none of them mentioned it and I think they would have!
I went to college with the creator of BoJack Horseman, we had a playwriting class together and because he’s very nice I didn’t resent him (overly) for being much better at it than me.
No one in HS, but I was in the same graduating class from a small Christian liberal arts college as Sufjan Stevens. I vaguely remember him from my geology class and am sure he wouldn’t know me at all. But one of my closest college friends was in a small-group Bible study with him, can you imagine??
I did not go to high school with anyone famous, but my grandfather went to high school with both Don Haskins (the coach of the Texas Western basketball team that won an NCAA championship with the first all-black starting lineup) and Owen K. Garriott (an astronaut).
He thought Haskins was great, but apparently thought Garriott was such a jerk that when their hometown renamed a street after him, my grandfather, to the end of his life, insisted on referring to that street by its old name.
Speaking of Hamilton, Renee Goldsberry went to my high school, but a couple years before me.
I went to high school with a girl who went on to be Miss America. She was…not nice.
Taye Diggs is the most famous graduate of my performing arts high school.
I didn’t really know him well personally, but some of my friends did and apparently he’s an extremely lovely person to everyone.
As far as I know, I did not go to high school with anyone famous or significant. I went to a big state school, so there was likely someone? A good number of my friends on the East Coast were at Brown during the time to overlap with both Emma Watson and Daveed Diggs. Did not know either of them, though.
My dad went to high school with Chip Zien, the original Baker in Into the Woods.
I was in a children’s chorus for years with Cam (country singer). It’s been really fun seeing her get famous after years of “Please come to my gig!” posts on Facebook.
Shawn Johnson the gymnast was a year ahead of me in high school. She was… not very nice.
David Pogue, the technology writer and sometimes-TV guy. Really really smart, very preppy and a little dork-y.
Also, the late R&B singer Gerald Levert, of the groups LeVert and LSG. Gerald was a couple of years younger, very overweight and a little reserved. His brother Eddie was in my year and….not a pleasant person.
I went to high school with a space shuttle astronaut, Mike Lopez Alegria. Which is nothing compared to my husband, who went to school and even knew Nicole Brown Simpson
i went to high school with two Playmates who were on The Girls Next Door (the twins).
I went to high school with one of the editors at Breitbart. Yay! He did not seem evil and hateful in high school. I occasionally try to think of signs that I missed, but I can’t think of any. I will never understand how he ended up where he did.
Something beautiful for today: a whole bunch of pictures of whales and dolphins, both above and below the water– http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/christo…
Yesterday my mom emailed me a link to the If Ayn Rand Gave a Mouse a Cookie post, and said, “I just discovered The Toast this morning, and sadly, it’s ending! You might already be familiar with it. I found it pretty funny.”
You guys. My mom found The Toast on The Last Week. And told me immediately, because she thought I would like it. ❤️❤️❤️
Then again, it might be that Mom suspected I would enjoy The Toast because I’ve been sending her links for quite some time. She’s one of the few people I know IRL who appreciate nonplussed women in western art. And as a retired teacher, Mom was very pleased when Hermione stopped doing everyone’s homework.
Any other mother/daughter Toasties out there? Or other Toastie relatives?
Oh, and I doubt that my mom reads the comments, but just in case, HI MOM!
My sister is on here! Hi authorialfuries!
*waves*
Between Toastie sisters, swapping Toast links is basically a daily occurrence.
My sisters too!
My mum is definitely not reading the Toast. She is happily Ludditian and does not even know how to retrieve text messages on her phone.
My daughter, on the other hand, would happily read The Toast and anything else she can get her eyes on. I’m having to be very careful what I have up on the screen when she’s about. Prime example: the rather racy vampire romance I’m editing at the moment.
I send Mom occasional links to discussion of religion, because that is her jam.
The boyfriend of a friend once pulled up one of the Ayn Rand pieces (the Narnia one, I think) that he’d found linked on either Facebook or Reddit and then tried to explain to me (in a very “dude explaining the internet to a girl he assumes doesn’t understand the internet” way) how it appeared that there were several of these Ayn Rand retellings on whatever this site was, but I should be able to find them if I’m interested if I click on the “Ayn Rand” series name or tag.
And I went, “It’s cool, I’ve read them already.”
And he went, “Yeah, I guess maybe the link went viral a little while ago, but I didn’t know if you’d seen it, because you’re never on Facebook.”
I replied, “But it’s The Toast, so . . .”
And he went, “I don’t know what that is.”
I refrained from telling him that that’s probably because he’s exactly the kind of straight white man I come here to avoid having to listen to. (He once tried to tell me that misandry was an actual real problem, so. That kind of guy.)
>.<
My mom definitely would have been a Toastie. For all the things we diverged on our senses of humor were well-synced.
My dad is a regular reader.
my twin sister is a toastie (oldsampeabody)! brother and sister-in-law read too, though not sure how regularly 🙂
No Toastie relatives that I know of, but my mom knows about my love of The Toast to the extent that she can pretty much always tell when something that I say is inspired by or a reference to The Toast.
Y’all. Self-inflicted unhygienic chewed food situation. I have lingual braces, and I was just now cleaning my breakfast out of my brackets with a dental tool thingy, and I flung a piece of buckwheat somewhere. That’s gross, but even worse, I think I may have flung it onto my clothes. Only I can’t find it. Knowing my luck, I’m preeeetty sure it’s there and will be noticed by all of my coworkers.
I mostly don’t mind the braces, but this is the kind of thing I hate about them.
ToastieSlack is incredible and I am a heavy contributor, but you’ns, I missed the simple joy of a good Open Thread, where the comments never disappear and your fellow Toasties shower you with approving upvotes instead of emoji
But the emoji are so great, especially the custom ones!
How do I get in on Toastie slack? I meant to join and never got it and now I am very very sad.
Email [email protected] asking for an invite to ToastieSlack and lo, one will come.
Thank you! I was also looking for an answer to this question.
Same.
It’s just now dawning on me that I’ve been dealing with The Toast ending by…not dealing with it? Basically I’ve been in a nice warm cave of denial for the past month and now the walls are starting to crumble. Uh. So. Fuck, I’m going to miss this place.
Me too
I’ve been in denial too. Every time I think about the Toast closing, I start welling up. I look ahead — next week — to days starting with no open link, no brilliant, insightful, witty comments; no misandry; no delightful people that I relate to. Yup, I’m crying now, so I have to go into denial again. Sheesh.
Same. I have brief mourning periods but they are brief, and I don’t think the reality will sink in until I come here for new content and it’s never updated. Oh, God — now I’m entering a brief mourning period…BRB.
It’s coming in waves for me. Most of the time I’m relatively calm and zen-like, and then a wave of sadness will sneak up on me and then I feel like this:
I’m on vacation for the first 2 weeks post-Toast, with v limited internet. Normally this stresses me out bc I know I’m missing so much Toastie goodness, but I’m trying to think of it as forced reprogramming of my ‘I’m awake, check the Toast. I’m bored, check the Toast. I’m hungry, check the Toast’ habits.
It still sucks.
Yeah :(((
I had my follow up for my cyst removal; i got referred to another doctor, meaning a 2-6 month wait time. On the plus side, this means that I can buy my tickets for Peaches in Montreal for mid-September. Anyone wanna meet me there?
waaaaaaah.
My kids leave tomorrow! I have not finished the yarn projects, craft projects, garden projects, room cleaning, clothes shopping/sorting, bike rides, drive in movies, pool parties, or s’mores bonfires I had planned. Because all that while working and a trip to NYC to visit cousins AND registering the kid for early college and band practice and trumpet lessons and summer reading and summer science units and lacrosse league and karate and dentist/doctor appointments is TOTALLY POSSIBLE to do in 3 1/2 weeks, and I’m a total failure at the summer vacation and deserve to have my mom license revoke. (She says at 9 am, having thankfully delegated todays’ band and trumpet driving back to grandma, and already being 45 minutes away from home and at school by 8 am.
It’s not like I have unacheivable goals or anything, ha ha ha!!!!!)
Seriously, I have like 8 loads of their laundry to find, wash, surreptitiously weed out, and help them pack for the next month, by, you know, noon tomorrow. No biggie.
I am somewhat nervous because I let the kids breed the rabbits for fair and it looks like the babies will be about 3 days too young to be allowed to go to fair, and I’ll have god knows how many rabbits and no way to get them to good homes. Plus, I’ve been out of the fair/4H loop for 5 years and …it was kind of nice not having them miss the first week of school for fair, and being able to go to meet-the-teacher nights, and not being tempted by baby goats that my son (the one moving out in 2 years!) and my landlady both want me to raise.
I don’t know where I’m going with this. I’m a bit scatterbrained today.
I, too, am tempted by baby goats but apartment living continues to thwart my dreams. And you are not at all a failure of a mom! It sounds like you are trying to do all the fun things with your kids with too little time (of course, there’s never enough of it!).
Exactly! The failure thing is tongue in cheek, today at least. It’s like looking at Martha Stewart’s thanksgiving when you’re having tofurkey. Different expectations!
I should know better than to try to schedule 4 things besides work/school in one day. Got to the morning one, missed the appointment I scheduled 3 months ago and can’t get another until August!, have a very important (takata airbag) recall that I REALLY need to do at the same time I REALLY need to get the HS boy to the community college to register….and I cant’ get my mom on her cell phone. I think if it comes to it I’ll miss the airbag appt, too, but ya know, that’s probably something I shouldn’t do.
Not enough time, indeed!!!
Maybe they can take sign-up sheets and photos of the baby rabbits to the fair to find new homes for them that way, even if the rabbits themselves can’t go? Maybe it’s already easy to see which babies would make good duos or trios, too?
My own bunny came from a rescue after a breeder bred more than he could take care of and abandoned a bunch of them, so sympathetic alarm bells went off when I read this! Mine is now a litter-box trained loving and highly opinionated 8-year-old dutch dwarf.
That’s a good idea. I have had weird luck with rabbits. My daughter’s have all died — one got scared to death by a raccoon, one got eaten by a huskie (I told her it ran away), but my son’s rabbit is 6 years old and going strong. Those were all mini rex’s. So I have two of those, and two harlequins, which are the ones I just let breed. Both won best in show last year before they were handed to us by graduating seniors, so it was kind of important to the previous owners that we keep the lines going. But, geesh, so much to worry about! (and the poor doe is still looking a little shellshocked from the whole mating experience!)
oh no, scared to death! That is the saddest thing.
Maybe the doe can get her tubes tied after she’s had a few litters. Or the male. I hear it’s good for their temperaments. Harlequins are adorable, and smart enough to be good litter-box-users too, I hear! Someday I’d love to have one.
It is VERY good for their temperaments! My netherlands dwarf got a lot less skittish after we had him fixed. Like pre-fixing: he would not eat if he thought people were looking at him. Now, he eats out of our hands.
oh the dutch dwarfs!
Love your story. I’ve only known mine post-fixing, and he eats out of my hand too, but favorite foods still occasionally get dragged in a mad dash off into hiding to be enjoyed in private, so that you see fennel fronds rhythmically wiggling just outside the entrance to one of his hidey-holes, no bunny visible but the fennel magically getting shorter and shorter by the second and a distinct crunching sound. He is often snuggly — he is flopped out between my legs on the sofa right now as I type — but it is more like living with a woodland animal than a domesticated creatures sometimes! (Not unsurprisingly given the breeding history).
We have plans to move to Edinburgh and, besides the whole I’m scared shitless because I have never moved internationally and I will probably completely suck at getting it right, I am now a bit scared about what’s going on in the UK. I know all of it is happening in England and not Scotland, so far. But… shit, it’s scary.
Edinburgh is the best city! I know a lot of politics is going down and people are being scary, racist jerks but…Edinburgh! That is so exciting. Congratulations!
Thank you! I am totally excited — when I’m not scared, that is.
Edinburgh is the best place in the world and it will be fabulous and I would move back there in a heartbeat. It also had the highest percentage of Remain votes in Scotland, and is very very integrated. I have not heard much re: anti-immigrant rhetoric from my friends there (as in, reporting incidents).
Your’e going to be fine and I am jealous beyond belief.
Thank you, this is more than heartening! We’ve never actually been to Edinburgh. Yet! We’re going for a week in September, but we’ve pretty much made our decision 99.9%. But I’m only hearing good things. I think I’m just being anxious about moving in general since I’ve only ever just moved around within Vienna. We will be fine. I’m making that my mantra.
Why did you leave and where did you go?
Oh, you’re going to love it! I’m headed back for a week in August and am counting down the days. It’s truly the most beautiful place in the world (IMO) and the only place I’ve ever lived where there are book events every single day. Given that I’m a writer and a total book nerd, it was heaven.
I left because my visa was up and, despite my best efforts, I couldn’t find a company to sponsor me. I’m now back in the US after a 6 month stint in New Zealand.
If you want any help or even just more reassurance, let me know! I’m over in Slack on the same user name. 🙂
Edinburgh’s amazing, and Scotland won’t be part of the UK for much longer, so you’ll be fine.
That is totally what I am counting on. We already started saying: “Our gal Nicola will fix this.”
I’ve never lived in Edinburgh but I have moved back and forth between the US and UK more than once – you’re going to be fine. Scotland is very pro-immigrant compared to the rest of the UK. Also, it has all the best politicians.
I have visited Edinburgh quite a few times and loved it there. It is an unbelievably lovely city in an unbelievably beautiful country, with great rail links and the nice tram from the airport and the countryside and the sea right there, too. I would absolutely move there myself (and might, really, given the current omnishambles).
You can do this! International moves are a steep hill to climb but the view is great.
If you do move there, make sure to look me up, alright? 🙂
It’s a plan 🙂
Also, apparently there’s a UK channel on Toastie slack that I haven’t figured out yet? There might be Edinburgh people there.
I just joined it. What’s your handle on Slack?
Just this minute joined; whew, new apps – I think I am becoming an old.
I am @awordchild on the slack as well! What’s yours?
I loved living there for a year! It’s a gorgeous and wonderful place. Hope you have a great time!
Even with all the Brexit nonsense, I am so overwhelmingly jealous of and inspired by you! You are living the dream. How are you making it work??
Awwww, this is heartening 🙂
To be honest, we’ve tried to move to the UK for years, but something has always come up. We were either broke, dealing with deaths in my family, both recovering from burnout, one of us suffering from severe depression, the other one from undiagnosed ADHD — or a combination of those issues. It was like some fucking force of nature didn’t want us to move there.
This is the first time we are really seeing a chance of making it. We’re 32, have never moved internationally and scared stiff. But we’re finally somewhat secure, financially speaking, and basically just waiting for my wife to finish her MA degree because we don’t say no to free education. We find out she doesn’t have to be living in Austria to hand in her thesis and can just fly back to take her exam. So we’re getting ready to move in November. And then fucking Brexit happens, right? 😀
Fortunately, we’d already decided a few weeks ago that London would be impossible to afford and chose Edinburgh. I’m glad we made the decision unrelated to Brexit.
As for how to make it work: I’m self-employed and will be able to keep my two retainer clients, that should tide us over for a bit while my wife looks for a job in Edinburgh. Also, savings. We hope we’ll be able to find a flat within the first month there, so we won’t have to shell out for an Airbnb longer than that. *fingers crossed*
This was probably more answer than you bargained for. Whooops. Point: You should totally move wherever you want too. If we scaredycats can make it work, anyone can. 😉
Welcome to Scotland, nothing to be scared of. Edinburgh is a very welcoming city, we will have a beautiful Christmas Market in Princes Street gardens in November in the shadow of the castle. Sorry for randomly appearing in your conversation. An article about Miss Haversham brought me here. Don’t be worried about the political situation here at all, the Scottish government are very competent and are helping navigate us through the Brexit storm and the Scottish people are having a quiet peaceful revolution alongside, which may end up with us being an independent country and still part of Europe. So I’d say you are coming here in exciting times and will be very very welcome.
I am going to see a neurologist tomorrow and am so excited to have a physician tell me it’s all in my head and finally be right.
*ba dum chhhhh*
Reminds me of that crushing Fiona Apple lyric: “He said, ‘it’s all in your head,’ / I said, ‘So’s everything,’ but he didn’t get it”
Good luck tomorrow!
Thanks! It would be great to rid myself of these chronic migraines. Fingers crossed this doctor has a solution!
ILY
Sorry if this has been covered, is there a definitive list of places Toasties will be gathering when this all comes to an end? I know there is a Slack group, but not sure how to find it, any other places I should bookmark now? Would love to be able to find all your kind words and encouragements in the future. Thanks!
for slack, email ppyajunebug at gmail !
Come to slack! It is awesome!
We also have a Reddit (r/ToastCrumbs/) And I believe there was talk of creating a Livejournal? And of course there’s ToastieTwitter!
ETA: And you can email ppyajunebug at gmail.com for a Slack invite
This. I was about to post the same thing cause Ive not been around in quiiiiite some time for various reasons and am worried Ill lose the ties I once had to this beautiful community. Basically WHERE ARE YOU GUYS GOING TO BE OH GOD WHY MUST THIS HAPPEN
There is a Toast Connections spreadsheet for all your Toastie-finding needs: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_26MiL9WN…
Been meaning to add this to my Drive, thank you.
So embarrassing being a slow learner of tech stuff…how do I edit my entry in this thing? Can I edit it? I have no idea how that works.
I think you just type over whatever you want to edit and it saves automatically. That’s what I did!
You can join the Slack channel by emailing ppyajunebug(at)gmail(dot)com.
It seems like a kind of overwhelming place at first (the openthread channel is very busy a lot of the time), but what I’ve found works for me is to mostly hang out in a few of the quieter, lower-traffic channels. (I think we’ve got roughly a billion channels in the Toast Slack, so you’re pretty guaranteed to find a few that are for Toastfolks who share something in common with you.)
I’m not sure how many people will be following me to clevermanka.net, but I DO plan to host a Friday Open Thread thing every week, at least as long as there’s interest and participation. I plan to use IntenseDebate so everyone can keep their profiles, too (although IntenseDebate hasn’t been supported by WordPress in years, so here’s hoping it will work).
Oh God bless you. I love IntenseDebate!
Thank you! I like it, too, and it makes me sad that it’s not supported anymore. I haven’t been able to test it with Actual Comments, obviously, so HERE’S HOPING it works when things go live on Monday.
I will def be following.
Are there also suggestions for other websites to haunt after this week?
I am leaving my town tomorrow and leaving the US July 1 and I feel so woefully underprepared and frantic. I need to finish cleaning and the Goldfinch and so many little and gigantic things. I’m going to join the Slack group once I am settled though, so that’s something I’ll motivate myself with.
“Ampersand” by Amanda Palmer. Maaaybe not so applicable if the relationship you’re leaving wasn’t unhealthy and emotionally draining, but if it was, there’s no better rebuilding-my-self-respect anthem! Sample lyrics that helped me through my specific breakup:
And I may be romantic
And I may risk my life for it
But I’m not gonna die for you
You know I ain’t no Juliet
And I’m not gonna watch you
While you burn yourself out, baby
No, I’m not gonna stop you
Cause I’m not the one that’s crazy.
dammit that was supposed to be in response to Honeybunchoats looking for post-breakup songs! auuuugggghhh
I got an Amanda Palmer style Ampersand tattooed on my shoulder shortly before getting married (well, fake married… or civil-unionised?) as a reminder to not just be “the one side of an ampersand”. But I can see it working as a breakup song as well because, essentially, it’s a song about being your own person.
Does anyone have any gifs/cheers/stories to pump me up to make a psychiatrist appointment? My therapist suggested I consider taking an SSRI for my anxiety and depression and recommended a few doctors, but I’m having trouble actually getting my butt in gear to make the appointment. I do actually WANT to try it, so that’s not the problem, it’s just that depression and anxiety like to make it hard to combat themselves.
Be hardcore like Haley. You can do it!
I understand completely. Been there. It *is* hard. But you can do it.
If you’re a listmaker like me, write out tiny steps on paper, like these:
1. Write a simple script, every word. (Hello. My name is TheRenleigh. My therapist gave me this number. She suggested an SSRI for my anxiety and depression. When may I have an appointment, please?)
2. Find where you put the recs from therapist.
3. Get recs list, script, and phone next to each other and keep them together. In a bag, if necessary.
4. Call one of the numbers, even if it’s 2 a.m.
5. Make calling another number something you do every time you wash your hands after using the toilet. You can stop after you get an appointment.
Reward yourself for every step. Even if it takes all day to accomplish only one. Progress is the goal. I’ll cheer you on, personally, if you want to alert me to your progress at rosecameliatoast at gmail.
I remember being apprehensive both about meeting a new support person and about starting meds, but I am very glad I did.
Hugs and encouraging thoughts coming your way. Making the phone calls was the hardest part for me; the actual appointments were way easier. You have Toasties cheering you on!
I am in the same boat, except I don’t have any recommendations to go off, only a provider list from my insurance website that so far seems to be woefully inaccurate. I already have a lot of anxiety about calling to try to take this first step and the possibility that my information isn’t correct is only making it worse. I’m not sure what I’m so afraid of, other than some potentially awkward phone interactions. But reading your post made me feel a little better that I’m apparently not the only one having a hard time with this. I wish you all the luck.
Realtalk: I went back into therapy and back on SSRIs last February, after (what I thought were) 5 successful years off. The truth is I was miserable for most of that time, it was interfering with my work, I was making my loved ones miserable, and there was absolutely no good reason for me to keep feeling like that. I am so grateful that I did it, I’m grateful for all the support I’ve received.
(Jesus-y toast stuff follows)
Thanks to something Nicole posted that sent me down a rabbit hole, I’ve recently started to look at my meds as a gift from God (I’m a Catholic), rather than a manifestation of my failure. Being grateful rather than angry has actually made me more conscientious about my message and my mental state.
Update! I made some calls! The first place was closed for lunch but I called back, only to find out they weren’t taking new patients. The next doctor I called had a confusing answering machine, but I left a message. I only had those two suggestions, but fortunately I have a therapy appointment this afternoon, so I can ask for more recommendations. I’m pretty bummed that I don’t have an appointment now, but at least I did it and it wasn’t too hard.
Go you! Excellent work.
For me, the biggest fear was that a doctor would say “Oh no, you don’t need meds. You’re perfectly fine the way you are (aka miserable).” So I think you have the biggest problems already tackled – there are people in your corner who agree that medication will help you! And better yet, you know and understand that you need the help!
Figure out what your reward will be for scheduling the appointment (personal day from work, giant donut, giant salad, permission to lay on your couch and not talk to anyone for 2 hours after making the phone call). Then, go out there and kick some appointment-scheduling butt!!
So now that I’ve been dealing with my breakup, I’m trying to figure out what to do about a stupid decision I made. 6 months into our relationship, I helped him get a car by taking out a loan with him co-signing, as my credit, even though it still wasn’t great, was much better than his was. Is there any hope of me removing my name from that loan? He’s making payments and is employed, but I’d rather have all ties cut off. Trust me, lesson learned here.
I believe so – do you have a copy of the paperwork at all? If not, try one of the credit history reporting places and run a free credit check on yourself, it’ll come up with the payee info. Contact them to see what they say.
You are going to need him to get his own loan/buy the car out from you. What co-signing does is not do is make you both half owners of the car. Instead you both are on the hook for the whole car- you basically agreed that either one of you will pay for that car in full. If he ever stops paying, they’ll come to you. The lender isn’t going to want to take a person who can pay off the loan. When the car is paid off you will both co-own the car as well.
Here are your choices. One of you gets a loan for the full amount left on your first loan and transfers the loan over- by selling the car to the other person, then that person alone pays. Two, you return the car to the lender, take the hit in the interest and pay off a smaller loan- then no one gets the car and you are both out a bit of money.
Or three, you accept it and just make peace. This might be the hardest pill to swallow, because you will be nervous for a few more years, but…it requires no contact with your ex unless he screws up payment.
Eh, that’s not technically true; you will not co-own the car because you co-signed the loan. Whoever’s name is set up to go on the title once it’s paid off will own the car, full stop- you have no right to the vehicle.
Oo, oo, I know this one! I work at a bank (a credit union actually).
You can go with him to have the loan re-financed to be just in his name. Having had the loan and (hopefully) making on-time payments should have improved his credit. The terms might not be as good as the original loan, but that’s his loss.
Alternatively, you could have it refinanced so it’s only in your name. You would still be relying on him to come through with payments though, so that’s not the best option, but at the very least you’d be more in control of the situation.
Check your local credit unions first, rather than the big banks. Mine borderline specializes in auto loan refinance, so a lot of times they’re going to be getting you the best rate.
(my SO works at a credit union, yay credit unions!)
Three cheers for beating cancer! The port looks very cool; I think I’d be tempted to turn it into a necklace.
UK news has, unsurprisingly, been consumed over the last few days with Brexit stuff (in summary: everything is fucked). Has some new scandal happened with Hillary Clinton? A Facebook acquaintance* has just posted to say “I was actually defending Hillary Clinton and the illegal shit she was pulling because I thought she was a better candidate for presidency than Trump”, but they have now given up on her. Is there news, or is this just people being generally awful. (Despite not living in the US, I still have at least two vehement “Never Hillary” people on my Facebook. They’re not even American. People are the worst.)
Speaking of Facebook, I had a recommended group called “Stop Allowing Immigrants Into The UK” show up on my sidebar this morning. I am disgusted.
*I am still friends with this person on Facebook because he was a friend on my first ever online community (a long-dead Buffy forum), but am finding him increasingly infuriating, although he’s not a bad person. Lots of usage of long, intellectual-sounding words which are often used wrong or misspelt; lots of self-righteous posts making it clear that he espouses the Correct Views (re. feminism, etc.) when other posts don’t seem to bear this out; massive amounts of film-related pretension. I think he may wear a fedora. (And, sadly, lots of friends with appalling views. He is in Ireland, and I get the odd “murdering babies is wrong!” post show up on my feed because of friends of his.)
If he is friends with people in Ireland who share those kind of posts then he is actively consorting with a very shitty part of the Irish internet and blocking / muting him would definitely be *no* loss, should you wish to.
Apologies for my post sounding like I was implying that being in Ireland automatically means knowing lots of aggressive pro-lifers! Obviously it does not.
(And thank you for the validation.)
Facebook’s Recommended Groups algorithm has been on a terrifying bender lately. I’ve gotten all kinds of hideous Meninist style groups, in addition to Trump supporters and I don’t understand! What could I possibly have done to them?!
I suspect your Facebook friend has just been reading people’s opinions on the Internet. The top Clinton-related news today is that the Benghazi panel just released its report and it contains no damning revelations about Clinton whatsoever, or really anything about her that the public hasn’t heard a hundred times already.
hi yall – so I was going back in time to try and find the column mallory did about harsh truths (maybe a month – two months ago) and i can’t make it work.
what page does this link http://the-toast.net/author/mallory-ortberg/page/… show yall?
for me it is showing the same new articles as are shown here – http://the-toast.net/author/mallory-ortberg/
I’m seeing the same as you.
Ooh, an Open Thread! How handy.
First: Congratulations New Mommy on getting your port out… what a relief that must be.
Second: I’m thinking of starting a profile/page/blog/whatever on Medium. Has anyone used it much, and if so, what are your thoughts? I’ve been using WP for a few years and am in a bit of a rut there; thought I might branch out into something new and Medium seems like where all the cool kids are hanging out (which is one reason it scares me, because let’s face it, I’m neither cool, nor a kid, despite my reluctance for adult responsibility).
Hey. Question for you: we’re about to adopt our first dog, a retired racing greyhound. We’ll probably be taking a dog home a week and a half from now. I’m very excited, but also experiencing pangs of panic about whether this is a good idea. Rational evidence says it’s fine, and we’ve been planning this for a long time. Is this normal to feel so freaked out?
Completely normal. It’s a big responsibility!
When we adopted our first dog, we fostered him for a weekend, and the first day, we were saying to each other, ‘Oh, geez, he smells so bad. We can’t keep him.’ And then by the end of the weekend we were all, ‘We can’t possibly take him back to the refuge….’
It’s so, so lovely when they come into your lives and you get to know each other. We had that dog for six years and he was awesome. I still miss him now.
Freaking out is a sign you care enough to do it right. The only people I know who decided “hey, let’s get a pet” and were 100% chill about the entire process had to return the cat to the shelter four days after adoption because their parents decided they didn’t want to pay vet bills.
That’s such a helpful thing to hear. I’m looking to adopt a dog this coming fall, but I’m such a huge dog lover that I’m really nervous to actually take the plunge myself because I’m terrified I’m not ready or I don’t have enough money or something is going to go terribly wrong. But I also want a dog so, so, so badly… Reassuring to hear that my anxiety (probably) means my heart is in the right place.
So normal! When I adopted my dog, the first week was very overwhelming and full of stress crying and now we’re best buds! I couldn’t imagine life without him!
It’ll be okay. Stressful at first, and you might question why on earth you did this, but it’ll be okay.
Very normal. I was increasingly freaked out in the days before my dog arrived and for a few days after, but it quickly became clear that adopting her was the best decision ever.
It’s normal! If you spend the first few weeks thinking, “Dear God, what have I done?” …that is also normal!
It’s a big responsibility, and even with the most chill dog, it’s a big adjustment. You can do it!
Yes, it’s normal to feel freaked out. And give yourself time after you get him/her. I had a 4-6 month period of living with my little guy before it became True Love.
Thank you for making me realize that a retired racing greyhound is the exact kind of dog I want to adopt (or, as Mallory put it: a dog that is almost asleep 90% of the time).
PRECISELY. I wanted a dog, but one that would be more like a housecat and less like a perma-toddler.
Honestly, I’m consistently freaked-out by people who refer to their dogs as “fur-kids” or “fur-babies” and hope I don’t become such a person. I’m conceptualizing this dog as more of a “napping companion” or “adventure-friend”, or perhaps “loveable deadbeat roommate.”
I am an enormous lover of dogs, but “furbabies” bugs the shit right out of me. It is possible to be one and not the other… I think you’re out of danger.
“Perma-toddler” is a DREADFULLY accurate way to describe most dogs, oof.
I saw someone on FB who made a comment like “My nephew’s a corgi mix, and he loves to play,” and I was thinking “Did I read that right? Surely she meant ‘my nephew’s dog,’ right?” Nope, the dog is her nephew.
I hope your facebook friend is a terrier.
Or maybe her sister married a corgi?
For the record, it’s as normal to be freaked out about getting a dog as it is to be freaked out by people who refer to their dogs as fur-kids. And it’s also perfectly normal to say “I will never refer to my dog as my fur-kid or to myself as my dog’s mum” and then to cave approximately 6 months in. Ahem.
Mine is a calm, old, low-energy perma-toddler who sleeps 90% of the time, but her naked need for human attention and affection is not in any way comparable to the independence of a deadbeat roommate (i.e. a cat) and it brought out the parental in me in ways that I was not expecting and never experienced with cats.
Definitely not all dogs are like that and not all people will have that reaction. But if it happens and it freaks you out, that too is normal and will be OK.
I’ve adopted several cats, and each time I get a sort of post-partum depression. (I know, not really, that’s for moms giving birth.) I think it’s quite normal to feel panicky and stressed and even depressed. (Every time I also think “Oh kitty, I’m sorry, I’m terrible for you and I shouldn’t have adopted you!” But I know that I’m actually a great cat mom.)
But many people change their minds and have to return the pet – sometimes for stupid reasons but often for very good reasons (like “I was going out of my mind with stress.”) So although it is meant to be a forever home and a done deal, it is not as concrete a contract as giving birth. It will be ok. There is an escape clause if you get desperate, so let that remain in the back of your mind, and don’t freak out.
I LOVE YOU ALL! WISH ME LUCK WITH INTERVIEWING augh the nerves
Good luck! You got this.
good luck!
Good luck!!!! Once you get in there you’ll shine!
Good luck! May you have clear thought and clear expression!
Apparently, men deserve cookies just for doing the majority of their job while women are out for a measly three days on vacation. That’s what I’ve learned so far this morning. >: |
Without too many details, a man I know recently said, and I’m quoting, that he should get some credit for not burning down my house. I laughed.
Dracarys.
Also, I’m in a weird hole of shitty autism-plus-undiagnosed-anxiety-without-being-taught-any-ways-to-cope-with-either-of-them situation right now. I got diagnosed with autism when I was 16 but the only help I got was a 504 Plan (which accommodated nothing and was just to establish a paper trail), a shitty therapist who blamed all my problems on my autism, and a “social skills” group for people who were way “lower-functioning” (fuck that term) than I was. I have never been medicated for either autism or anxiety, nor have I had any CBT or other options to keep my brainweasels in check.
My lack of support structure bit me in the ass last semester and my academic scholarship to college is kind of fucked rn. (I got through finals with decent grades but didn’t do an entire final essay because I kept having what I think now were panic attacks when I tried to start it, and I’ve been avoiding three online classes I’m technically enrolled in this summer.) I’m going to an appointment this Thursday to see if I have an actual anxiety disorder, and if I want to continue my degree I basically have to have an undiagnosed/unmedicated disorder I can point to as a reason why my GPA tanked. I do think I have an anxiety disorder and I do want to manage symptoms of both it and the shitty bits of my autism, but I don’t know exactly what my motivations are for doing so. Do I want to get medication because it seems effective or because it will provide a convenient delineation of “pre-treatment GPA and post-treatment GPA” for grad schools? Are all therapists who work with patients with autism/anxiety as focused on their patients’ disorders as my old one? How do I manage the negative effects of my autism without losing the bits that I like?
Please advise, I am at a loss and also haven’t slept for a day and a half because
I don’t have autism, but I do have anxiety/depression stuff, and my therapist is not particularly concerned about actually labeling whatever disorders I have, but instead focused on helping me cope with the aspects I want to cope with. I was actually a bit put off at first, because I wanted to hear “yep, here is this definitive thing wrong with you and there is a specific way we will deal with it” but now I appreciate it.
Hugs. I hope you get some sleep soon, as well as a non-shitty therapist who will let you take the wheel about how you manage your stuff. (Also that’s my favorite Spongebob gif.)
Oh, bb, I have zero advice for you, but wishing you all the best. I hope you find a support structure SOON.
ahhh I send many hugs to you if you would like them–this is a tough situation! But you will be okay! You will find treatment options that work for both the anxiety and autism aspects of your situation.
Case in point: my sibling has autism and severe anxiety and has found a treatment regimen (meds, excellent therapist who specializes in working with autistic adults but doesn’t make all Sibling’s problems about autism) that works for them. They are most definitely still autistic, but they are having an easier time navigating a world that isn’t built for them–so what you hope for is possible.
…I hope having a specific example helps?
Your motivation is that you feel terrible and it’s making it hard/impossible for you to function in daily life. You just want to feel better–that’s enough! Any doctor that makes you justify more than that needs to be kicked to the curb.
As far as medication goes, probably it will help you deal with anxiety, which will make any challenges you face with autism easier to deal with. It probably won’t be a magic bullet, but it should make things easier.
Talk to your advisor about your classes, see if you can take an Incomplete for anything you can’t drop. Then you can either finish the course later, or at the least you won’t have a low grade on your transcript.
I don’t have any advice, but I do want to say that I was in the same boat as you, only the other way around. I had anxiety issues diagnosed when I was a teen, and undiagnosed ASD (the useless group therapy sessions I had were for eating disorders, except I didn’t eat because of texture/executive processing issues, not eating disorder issues).
I also lost out on my 100% academic scholarship halfway through, and my GPA took a dip (got my first C’s and D’s my junior year of university, had been on the Dean’s List until then), because I just didn’t have the proper support to realize how bad things were for me. I never did get good support, but I did get into grad school just fine, and had a professor who was very supportive of me (his kid is autistic, and I think he saw similar traits in me) who wrote a recommendation letter. (Turns out my lack of support and proper diagnosis/therapy meant I failed at grad school, at least the online program, but that’s partly because of my specific anxiety vectors related to formal writing.)
I think you’ll make it and be okay! Just recognizing the problem and looking for help will be a huge boost. And anxiety disorders are pretty common with ASD because of all the ASD stuff piling up until you can’t help but develop anxiety issues.
Good luck!
Oh I do have 1 advice!
It helped a LOT for me to cut back from a standard “full time” schedule to only 2 or 3 classes per semester. 2 classes was ideal. It was just as much effort/work for me as when I tried 4 classes (I gave full effort to 2 instead of half or quarter effort to 4, I guess? that’s a bad explanation), but it was so much less overwhelming that I was much more successful. I was capable and got good grades with a full schedule, but the anxiety and stress to keep organized and prepared was too much.
When they first announced The End, I commented “If The Toast Was Your Dying Girlfriend,” and it got a bunch of likes, so it seems to have resonated. I know the whole “death” thing is overkill, but I can’t be alone in feeling a real sense of mourning about this whole thing. So join me:
If The Toast(dot net) was your dying girlfriend, you’d spend every remaining day with her being a surreal mix of desperately sad and elated to just be with her.
If The Toast was your dying girlfriend, every day you’d hang out with her and all of your best friends, the wittiest, kindest, most thoughtful, misandriest people in existence.
If The Toast was your dying girlfriend, you’d be sad and scared to lose her, but she’d comfort you and make art history jokes and insist on having endless erudite debates about intersectionality in academia and Bronte/zombie fanfic and Dads and anything but the election.
Ha! There’s a new post up all about the “if X were your Y” series, so I’m migrating this thread over there.
If The Toast was your dying girlfriend, you wouldn’t care about delivery fees and get all of your favorite foods to the house each day. Each meal would be delicious and each craving satisfied.
TBH, I have written off anything remotely work-related this week and am spending all my time with my dying girlfriend or building my new house where I have to go live without her.
If the Toast was your dying girlfriend, she would write a letter for you to read after she was gone, demanding a solemn promise that you would wait to read it until the first time you found yourself laughing and then feeling guilty because you were in mourning and it didn’t feel right. The letter would begin “Oh honey, forgive yourself. Laughter is not the enemy of grief.” Then, a full page of “Inside Jokes, in order of insideness.” Finally there would be a small, brightly colored envelope, marked “when next you are lonely.” Inside: Two Monks Invent the Afterlife.
Perfection.
It’s funny and sad because it’s TRUE.
((hugsforever))
Ow my feelings! (In the best way obv.)
It’s devastating because it is so fucking sweet. How dare you!
THAT MADE ME CRY HOW DARE YOU
If the Toast was your dying girlfriend, you’d make her a comforting mix CD. It would be half powerful intersectional feminist anthems, the other half dirtbaggy 70s rock, showtunes (Side 1 of Hamilton ONLY, please), and bubblegum pop. It moves her to get up and dance. But the last track is medieval liturgical chanting, and a heavy mood settles as you listen. As the song ends, she opens her mouth to say something. You lean in to listen, thinking your heart cannot possibly take another serious conversation about death. “You know,” she says, “this particular chant was not widely known outside northern France until the late 1600s, but the language is that of a much earlier period in coastal Ireland. It’s actually a really interesting story, how the tradition made its way over via an order of traveling monks in fishing villages…” You let her rest her head on your shoulder as she continues.
Because she is a nerd to the last.
Y’all are my kind of people. <3
I’m just waiting for an actual medievalist to show up and start correcting the stuff I just completely made up 🙂
Because your dying girlfriend is also a pedant, though she will make self-deprecating jokes about this trait.
Ugh, I had a NIGHT last night.
My phone, which I have had for less than a month, decided to go on strike. It still turns on, and it still receives texts and stuff just fine, but the screen doesn’t display anything. Even though it responds to my touch, it stays completely black at all times. THE BEST PART is that this happened while I was on my way to visit a friend, so I wasn’t able to call her/reference which apartment number was hers when I got there! I buzzed random buzzers until I found the right one. :/
(Dinner with my friend was actually very nice so we’ll skip over that.)
THEN I REALIZED THAT I LOST MY WALLET. It was nowhere in my bike panniers or in my pockets or in my friend’s apartment. So I started the five mile bike back to my place, going very slowly and examining any promising piece of garbage I saw on the street.
AND I FOUND IT. It got run over a few times, but everything’s still in it. So at least that’s not a worry anymore. I was super freaked out because I’m leaving town tomorrow, too.
But my phone is still broken. They’re sending me a new one free of charge, but it’s gonna take a few days. I feel so adrift!
I’ve spent the past eight hours sorting out my carefully curated finances in preparation for the stupid end of financial year. Meaning checking to see what I’ve made in my small business for the year vs. what my deductions are and checking out my retirement fund contributions, which I have been contributing to assiduously to see if any further spending would get me into a lower tax bracket.
Readers, to get into the lower tax bracket I would need to spend more than I currently have in my bank account, and I was so proud of that bank balance a couple of days ago. So instead of 19 cents on every dollar over $18 000, I’ll be stung for $3572 AND 32.5 cents per dollar on every dollar I earned over $37 000 and I am PISSED. I would be better off if I sat on my arse and did nothing!
Australia, kids. The sun is nice but the taxes are freaking high.
What are your favorite things to eat on toast?? It wouldn’t be right to not eat as much toast as possible this week. I’ll pull out the last of last year’s jam and grab an avocado, what else?
avocado and farmers market honey. so sweet, so creamy.
Butter + sharp cheddar. The cheddar needs to be sliced fairly thinly and out of the fridge for long enough that, when placed on hot toast and ignored for 30ish seconds, it becomes sweaty. I call it toast and sweaty cheese and you will pry it from my cold dead hands.
I am very interested in this.
Gouda is also an excellent choice for this, and, if you are feeling REALLY ritzy? Manchego. Divine.
This with honey
Cinnamon-sugar toast was one of my favorite treats/comfort foods when I was a kid.
mashed avocado, bit of hot sauce, runny egg.
My Fancy Breakfast as of late has been sourdough toast with an over-easy egg, some chopped-up artichoke hearts, a little bit of grated parm, and a dash of hot sauce.
avocado and mango chutney together. TRUST ME.
That sounds amazing, actually . . . I might need to try that . . .
Almond butter and a drizzle of honey!
Cookie butter, definitely. Failing that, my dad used to make us toast with butter and cinnamon sugar when we were sick and it is still a comfort food for me.
Is that the mashed-up ginger / molasses cookie stuff? Speculoos? SO YUMMY.
Creamy feta and oven-roasted grape tomatoes! This is basically all I’ve been eating for days.
Because toast is an all-day food:
Breakfast: salty dark-roasted peanut butter.
Snack: Ricotta, sliced ripe tomato, and freshly ground black pepper.
Dinner: Wine-braised lentils.
Dessert: melted chocolate.
Toast IS an all day food! A+
Fried eggs OR butter and strawberry jam!
Creamed honey is very wonderful.
Nutella and cinnamon sugar.
Butter and honey
Butter and peach jam
(melted) Butter and rhubarb jam
(melted) Butter and my mum’s homemade marmalade
mmmmmmm
Mushrooms sautéed in garlic
This is my standard Fuck Everything, I’m Tired dinner.
good butter, salt, and sliced radishes.
Just butter. Sometimes simplicity is best.
Kaya is my jam. It is the taste of the things that were happy in my childhood.
Avocado and bacon.
Cheese and fruit! I’m all about cheddar + berry jam on toast, but whatever you’ve got will work.
Marmite and butter.
Honey and butter.
Mashed up chicken livers with brandy sauce.
I’ll be traveling the rest of the week, so I’ll take this OT as a chance to celebrate the editors. ((ToastieHugs)) to everyone, and thanks for bringing amazing voices and people together for three spectacular years.
If Nicole Chung Were Your BFF
If Nicole Chung were your BFF, you’d type something incoherent about the things people beside you in the coffee shop were saying, and your BFF Nicole Chung would text back the perfect phrase to slay them all as you headed out the door.
Every time you Skype Nicole Chung, your best friend forever, you’d discover you were wearing coordinating tops.
If Nicole Chung were your BFF, no one would screw up your pronouns or make assumptions based on your appearance or expect you to represent millions of people based on a single one of your characteristics.
If Nicole Chung were your best friend in the whole world, John Cho and Daniel Henney would “make” you help them plan surprises for her. Kristi Yamaguchi would get mad at being excluded and FB poke you on the regular to be sure she ‘s included next time. (Kristi Yamaguchi hasn’t quite caught up with social media, but being BFFs with Nicole Chung allows you to be generous and not patronizing about it.)
The Comment Section for Every Article Ever Written about Nicole Cliffe
1.SANSAAAAAaaaaaaa
2.She’s the one who doesn’t know what ‘literally’ means, right?
3.Yeah, that’s right, she literally has no clue what literally means, thank goodness you’re here to enlighten us all.
4.(This comment has been deleted)
5.(This comment has been deleted)
6.The Toast is closing on Canada Day. Is this her way of telling us if we don’t straighten up and fix America, she’s moving back to Rural Ontario?
7.Yes! More Blind Items from Rural Ontario! That’s my favorite!
8.Sure, they’re great, but remember all that early work on abortion and sex workers?
9.Sex workers having abortions, sounds like a HILARIOUS site, no wonder everyone loved it harharhar
10.How is this guy not banned?
11.Why do you assume it’s a guy?
12.Um…. Moving on. SANSA!
Mallory Ortberg Made Horrific
“We are closing The Toast”
Ahhhh!!! These are amazing!
You are wonderful.
Wonderfullllllll
Too, too perfect.
JESUS CHRIST DAKIMEL.
goddamnit that gif made me cry
genius!!!
This is perfect
thank you all! <3
I MISSED THIS EARLIER IN THE WEEK I’M SO GLAD I CAUGHT IT NOW
That’s it, for my next job I will accept nothing less than Social Media Guru to Olympic Champion Kristi Yamaguchi.
As you BFF, I entirely support this ambition and will throw my considerable fame (things go to my head a little quickly, I’m told, but only by wrong people) to ensure this happens.
Married toasters,
I have a question that I feel a bit odd asking, but here goes anyway. my partner and I have been together for coming up on 2 years now, and we’re in our early 30s. I moved to be with him, we agreed early on that we’re the marrying kids having kind of heteronormative people, that was part of the whole deal.
So here’s the crux- while I’m not in rush per se to get married, i do also kind of feel like, we should probably get the ball rolling on this whole thing, if we want to have kids and savings before we’re 67. Mostly its just getting the savings and planning underway. So here’s the dilemma.
Objectively I don’t believe in the proposal being a total surprise. However, my partner is very sentimental, and I feel like that might be something that has a lot of meaning to him, which I could easily ruin (example, we were browsing around a thrift store, he picked up a book, I nosed over and asked him about it, and it was something he picked up to surprise me by buying- I do that kind of thing to him ALL THE TIME).
Did anyone have this kind of issue in their path to matrimony? How did it get resolved? I just don’t want to be like, “hey do you want to surprise me by proposing, because if so, you have to tell me right now and do it in the next 3-4 months or I’m just going to bring up getting hitched.”
I sort of had this issue as well, in that I am very much not a fan of the whole . . .man gets to control/decide when “the question” happens, but I also suspected that my husband was generally traditional enough to want to ask me.
What ended up happening is that I straight up asked him one day if if he wanted to get married to me one day and he said something along the lines of “of course” and then about 6 months later he actually “asked” me. I also had my little sister tell him what sort of (very specific) ring I wanted, because I’ve worked in Fair Trade/handmade things for awhile which means buying jewelry for me can be challenging.
Anyway, that was probably not a helpful story! However, I would say that it is absolutely possible to have a conversation about getting married without ruining the circumstances of the surprise (which really I think probably happens more often than not, right? I think it is super weird that we have a cultural idea that a marriage should come as a surprise, which is bananas, when you think about it). So I think it is totally reasonable to have a conversation about the marriage, while leaving the details of the proposal up to him, if that is important to him.
I do support this third person/BFF/sibling liason sort of idea. I kneeeew a proposal was coming, at some point, but had NO IDEA had already bought and hidden the ring, ran it by my BFF, or that she knew when exactly the proposal was coming. Do you have a friend or sibling who’s close enough with both of you that it wouldn’t be weird or as intrusive to inquire?
we’re the marrying kids having kind of heteronormative people bro don’t marry kids
ok more helpfully – TALK TO YOUR PARTNER! I just don’t want to be like, “hey do you want to surprise me by proposing” soz but I think this is a situation where just you are going to have to ask. Then everything else about the proposal can be a delightful surprise, if you want.
also congrats!
My partner and I recently decided to get married and it all started when he brought up the idea of moving in together because I don’t want to live together as some kind of test to see if we want to be married – it’s a step on a trajectory for me. In that conversation, I told him that I want to get married at some point and that by the time he moves in (which will be July), I want us to be prepared to have a real conversation about a plan. Then back in April, I asked him what kind of timeline he had in mind, expecting him to mumble something about not having thought about it. And he said, “maybe December?”
So we talked and talked and I guess got engaged? But in my head, we’re not yet because he’s buying a ring (from one of my best friends who is a jewelry designer, but she doesn’t know that I know so I’ve only given him general input and am not making detailed decisions) and I told him that while I don’t need a “proposal,” I do really want a defining moment of some kind. We also haven’t told anyone other than our parents because the December plan is basically an elopement – which is a different story.
All that to say, I think you could still say “I’d like to get married to you someday soon” without ruining any surprises.
Husband and I found a good medium in that we went ring-shopping together so that he knew that I wanted and didn’t have to guess my ring size, but the actual ring-purchasing and timing of the proposal would be a surprise…with the caveat that, if he proposed in public (at a restaurant, at a sports game, etc.) I would dump him with extreme prejudice.
I proposed to my dude, at some point after “if we get married…” had turned into “when…” It felt like the right time to do it.
Later, he mentioned that he’d been juuuuust kinda starting to wonder which of my friends he could possibly ask for ring-buying advice. If I had to guess, I’d say I would have been waiting at least 6 more months if I had decided to keep quiet and wait for him to do it.
Which is to say, if you are concerned about time at all, definitely say something!
Argh.
This is frustrating because I feel like I can’t make the right sentences to explain the core of my dilemma. The answers here are good answers, but not to the question I want to ask. let me try over. I think the thing is not wanting to ruin someone else’s fun. If it is even fun? I don’t even know! But if you say to someone , “hey if you want to throw me a surprise party for my birthday, I’m free wednesday, thursday and friday night”- you might as well just be like, “hey, throw me a party.” Even if you are alike, “do you want to throw me a surprise party or should we just pitch in and invite everyone together?” it’s still sort of assumption-y.
I have stuck my nose straight into so many nice gestures from him that I’m sort of…wondering about how I can let him take this one and run with it. I have a strong suspicion that he would like that. I guess maybe skipping ahead to the end of the timeline or making a timeframe in which we discuss this stuff might be able to give him a little room to do this thing the way he wants? Or just bringing it up in general.
In our relationship, he’s the person who makes the momentum usually. But I like the idea of rough timeline chat, that might work best. Like, hey what’s the timeline for the next few years?
Maybe something like “I would like to get married in the next X months/years, do you agree? …ok, I won’t ask you any surprise-ruining questions about when or how you want to propose, but I want to make sure we’re on the same timeline.”
I think I understand. You think he wants you to be TOTALLY surprised having never even discussed the idea – and you’d like to give him that moment?
I think then you just have to decide how long you’re prepared to wait for that to happen.
noo….because we’ve already discussed the marriage end of things, so I don’t think this is like…total surprise, we’re on the same page about having savings and getting hitched and stuff, its just that the last year has been about implementing the moving in together plan and now we’re in a plan hiatus until one of us starts this whole conversation going on the next phase.
But we’ve never really talked about proposals, what they mean to either of us. I guess I’m more just frustrated with this conondrum where in all things we usually talk things through in great detail, but in this particular instance, I’m willing to not be all over it, since I really don’t care that much, but I think he will care a great deal, and I don’t know if there’s a good way to express how completely fine I am with leaving that up to him. In fact as I try to write it out here I think it’s becoming increasingly clear how hard this particular stance is to express.
We started to talk about being domestic partners. I have better health insurance, so it makes sense to me, as it’s something you can do quickly. He agreed to it, but he was also like, you know this is probably part of a longer conversation we should have. Then I said, do you want to wait to be DP? I’m ok with waiting on it if you aren’t ready, it just makes sense for your health issue to get this ball rolling. He said that he didn’t want to wait on the DP thing, but he did want to have the bigger conversation. Like, I’m ok with whatever, he’s on board for committment, but I’m sort of getting this vibe that he might be stalling on things that I see as separate from the engagement process, because he sees them as related and is trying to keep me from poking my nose into his project.
But I get it. I’m going to have to stick my nose in a bit to sort this out, just…urgh, he loves to do surprises and he’s bad about being sneaky enough to keep the person he’s surprising from asking questions….and I’d totally let him do that.
Maybe I need to leave my diary open on a table somewhere.
Right, I’m not normally a fan of passive manipulation but this sounds like a situation where being ideally open might sabotage itself. Can you watch a movie or something with a really romantic proposal or a really not-romantic proposal and oh-so-casually say, “Oh, that’s lovely, don’t you think?” and try to sound him out, without having directly brough it up?
I think the timeline chat is a good idea on many levels! Set up a reasonable time frame, make sure you share the same expectations, then he can be free to do whatever within the timeline.
Maybe you could also talk about other people’s proposals to try to get a better sense of what is important to him about it? Not like, in a cagey way, but it seems that public proposals bubble up on the internet often enough, so that could be an opening to talk about the kind of gesture that each of you would enjoy. Some people feel that talking about anything ruins the romance, though.
But also, I hate surprises. My spouse asked me–in a lovely and low-key way, after we had talked about our future several times–and I was still kind of peeved. I guess I didn’t want to be asked/proposed to by a dude?
Good luck!
Haha. Yeah like, I think the moments of commitment are going to be more meaningful to him than to me? In my head this is all a done deal, its just a question of when and how much we spend on it all.
It was basically expressed like, I’m not moving to live with you unless we assume this is a forever deal, and btw I want to be trying for kids by 35 or sooner, lets shake on that. so we did that about a year plus ago, and now we’ve lived together through the tough times where we weren’t in any position to make any of those ideas come through and here we are in the next step where everythings agreed to and we’re working through it and it’s all gone well so I’m like, ok this whole thing works, lets move it along. But I’m such a practical person, he’s the one who is like, lets get up and watch the sunrise and hold hands, and I’m the one who would ruin his surprise by being like, “ugh no thank you I’d rather get some sleep”.
I’d be fine eloping. A wedding sounds fun too, but so much money. I’m cool not having an engagement ring or having something cheap, ect. So its kind of like if he wants all the big ticket stuff, his clock is ticking more than mine, and I’m happy for him to have it, but he has to be the one to make it all happen? And I want him to have it, I dont want to ruin his fun.
I think I’m figuring out what I need to say though, so this is working.
Yeah people can surprise you with how traditional they can get about stuff.
For us, we did not do engagement rings (actual conversation: Spouse: “wait only the women get engagement rings? WTH?” Me: “patriarchy, dear!”). But we did do a medium-size, fancy-ish wedding, and doing the ceremony that we wrote in front of a lot of our people was actually even more meaningful to me than I thought it would be, if that makes sense.
Maybe y’all need to talk about your planning and gesture styles in general, outside the marriage context, too. 😉
We just straight up had a “so, proposing, how do you want this to go down?” discussion, figured out the things that were important to us, and then proceeded accordingly (which wound up being a mutual exchange of piggy banks because that is the sort of people we are). Talking is pretty much your only option unless you guys have that mind reading thing figured out.
I was definitely ready to get married before my husband was. Like, we both knew we would, but there were some lingering doubts that he had to deal with first. But we would have conversations about our long-term life together, everything from buying a house and getting a dog (both of which happened before we got engaged) to what we thought retirement would look like. And I was pretty adamant about when I wanted to start having kids by, so that gave him more of a timeline. Ultimately he did a very good job of surprising me with a proposal, knowing I would say yes. This all played out over 2 or 3 years, though, and I was willing to wait. If you have a shorter timeline, it’s probably worth being more direct. And the directness doesn’t necessarily have to be about a proposal. Maybe something like “I want to start trying for kids in a year and a half, let’s put together a baby-bucket list of everything we want to do before that happens” would get him thinking harder along those lines.
Yessssss, I think this is what I’m looking for, working backwards is probably the way to go.
We got engaged very young. Like, we were still in university young, so I don’t know if I will help you that much. We already knew we were going to get married some day, but I basically made it very clear that I wanted to get engaged. I don’t remember how I did this (which I guess is the crux of the issue) but I think I just brought marriage up all the time. You may want to be more explicit. Anyway, we got engaged when he was ready, so the time and place were a surprise. For us it was a nice balance and we were both comfortable going into it.
It sounds like your partner likes surprising you, so I would say talk it out with him. You don’t need to propose to have a discussion, after all.
Best wishes!
I don’t think that talking about marriage readiness and timelines automatically makes you engaged (unless you mutually agree that you are!) or takes away from a surprise proposal.
My husband and I, similar to you and your partner, had agreed early on that we wanted to get married in the long term. As we moved from thinking about marriage as a “someday” thing to something we wanted to happen soon-ish, we talked about how he wanted to surprise me with a proposal and how I wanted to make sure we were both totally in agreement even before that. (Like, I didn’t want to be thinking “AHHH, am I ready for this?” during a surprise proposal. I wanted it to be a moment celebrating our joint decision.)
So, our timeline went a bit like: husband saying “OK, I’m ready,” me dithering, both of us doing some ring hunting, me saying “OK, I’m ready too,” proposal like six weeks later. And I was still surprised!
YES! The word “marriage” is not some magical incantation that once you speak it, you become engaged. You can talk about it!
We had discussed getting married. Specifically, I had said, “I want to marry you, but you don’t seem 100% ready, so when you are, I would like you to you ask me. Oh, and I’d kind of like to get married in the next few years, especially if you want me to move to Boston with you.” And he’d said he needed to think on it for a while. And he did think on it for a while.
Then he started to ask oblique but pointed questions about small but symbolic items of jewelry, and we talked around that for a couple of weeks.
Then his mom emailed me to wish me congratulations. Woops!
Then a week later he proposed. 🙂
This is hilarious.
Oh, so the actual proposal:
November 2012, Saturday before election day. We are sleeping in, but I wake up sleepy/hungry. I head to the living room in my jammies to have a cup of juice before crawling back to bed. The doorbell rings. What? The doorbell doesn’t ring at this time of day. Must be religious people or some GOTV volunteers. Ignore it. But my curiosity gets the better of me and I step out and peek down the stairs from my second floor apartment. Standing at the door is a man with a huge vase of flowers. Ok, I’m intrigued.
I go downstairs and accept the delivery of two dozen roses…I am in my pjs, no bra, bed hair. 🙂 When I come back upstairs and head back to bed, my then-boyfriend is now awake and smiling. As we cuddle, he asks. I answer.
Fin!
I like that you remember this as the saturday before election day. It’s very sweet, although i’m suprised his mom’s flowers didn’t arrive first.
I remember that it was before election day, because I thought it would be pollsters or GOTV or candidates.
To clarify: the flowers were from him. His mom sent an email, and that came the week before.
Ha, no I got it, I was joking that you were lucky there weren’t two deliveries.
Ah! I see! 🙂
Hello! You are me! This time last year, when my boyfriend and I had been dating for about 2.5 years and living together for 1 (and he had moved out of state to be with me after I got a new job), I began to realize that I would like to be married. Specifically, to him. More specifically, within the next year or two. And I also realized, to my alarm, that I wanted HIM to propose to ME – alarming because this gave me Bad Feminist feels but also because I am definitely the long-term planner in the duo and I didn’t want to wait forever. Here’s what worked for me: have a friend over for a glass of wine, which then progresses to a bottle of wine, and then to cocktails. Come home pretty drunk and happy and tell your BF that you want to get married and want him to propose. Fall asleep immediately thereafter and NEVER SPEAK OF IT AGAIN, but decide that you are going to have a real, adult, sober talk during a weekend away 3 months later. Be surprised when he proposes on said trip before you can even bring up the topic. The end! Yes, you will have to get the ring sized down. (But he did consult with my best friend and remembered that I don’t do diamonds, so an overall A+ outcome.) Now your only worry is how to tell people that despite being engaged you have no interest in having a wedding, and are going to elope on your lunch break when you can get your schedules together. On second thought, that might just be me.
As EeMmBb said above, we talked about it. He really wanted to 1) buy a diamond ring and 2) surprise me with the proposal and the ring. Which he did! But it came after we had talked about that we wanted to get married, and by when, and when engagement should probably happen by (for us end of summer before his annual family reunion). I also showed him the types of rings I like, though the actual one I got was a surprise. You are both in the relationship, both making a huge life step and decision, both have values surrounding that — I firmly believe that it should be fully talked out beforehand.
I haven’t read this full blog post in awhile so YMMV and a general grain of salt for APW, but at the time it really helped me express my feelings about the whole thing: http://apracticalwedding.com/2012/11/weddings-fem…
(Particularly these points – sorry about the caps, it’s the headings copy and pasted)
1. YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO A SAY IN YOUR FUTURE. […]
5. WHEN YOU’RE IN A SERIOUS RELATIONSHIP, YOU HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY TO CREATE A NEW TIMELINE THAT REFLECTS BOTH OF YOUR NEEDS. […]
6. YOU HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY TO NOT LET THE IDEA OF HOW THINGS “SHOULD” BE GET IN THE WAY OF REALLY HEALTHY, NECESSARY CONVERSATIONS.
Yay Open Thread! I’m feeling super unproductive at work today so this is a boon. I’m going to share with you some highlights about visiting my parent’s last night to celebrate my dad’s 69th birthday, because its just so peak parents I feel like you’ll all enjoy.
When I got there, my dad was napping. It was 5:30 p.m. Goals, to be honest.
Something keeps scratching off paint and wood on their garage door and they can’t figure out what type of animal it is. So they’re borrowing my brother-in-law’s night vision camera that he uses for hunting to record the area and then will rewatch the footage like some weird NCIS episode to figure out what it is.
As my mother, sister and I were walking into the room to sing birthday to my father, my mom said “if the cake starts slipping off the plate, i want you and your sister to hit the floor to try and catch it and also to protect the new rug with your bodies.”
My mother gave me a bag of lettuce to take home and my dad gave me the Auto section of the paper because he wants me to start looking at trading in my car. I’m 38.
#parents.
My mum is always giving me big bags of vegetables from her garden! I love it. She also makes me lunch 3-4 times a week because my office is right near her house. Carrots cut into flowers! I am 32 or 8.
Wow, that is peak parents! My dad sent me actual want ads for jobs clipped from newspapers when I was job searching, even after I told him the internet was a far better resource and listings change constantly. He is baffled each time he visits by the fact that I don’t subscribe to a newspaper or have any in the apartment, even after I told him I’ve always disliked newsprint. I’m 41.
I love the use of the night vision camera! I have one, which I bought when my cat was lost and I became a hardcore lost-cat-searcher and joined a forum. It is pretty cool to view footage like a NCIS episode, and to see random things like foxes, opossums, raccoons, the mail man, my landlord going for a walk, etc.
I was about to tell you to keep us updated about the paint scratch mystery, but then remembered that THE TOAST WILL BE CLOSED! Aaaaagh! Though you can at least come back to this old thread and reply again. I want to know. Maybe a deer scraping its antlers?
Last month I went to the dr for some side pain, which the doctor wanted to order a colonoscopy for (but she never did because that’s how referrals work with my dr!). I did a round of antibiotics and had my follow up appointment yesterday (my relaxing day off ended up being a full day of appointments and locking my keys in my car. good times).
So it turns out I still have a uti and need to do 10 days of cipro, and while I’m waiting for the test to develop and trying to interrupt her monologue about interesting historical lectures she stops and says “what symptoms do you have?” and I mention the side pain and she says “no, what uti symptoms?” well the answer is none, I didn’t the first time, I don’t now, unless two years of intermittent side pain is related I had no clue I had a uti. “Then why did I test you for it last time?” I don’t know. “There must have been a reason, what was it?” I don’t know, you handed me a cup and told me to pee in it! “I just don’t understand why I would do that unless you had given me a reason.” Well, I don’t either, but nothing was ever explained to me!
And supposedly I need a coupon to get my epi-pen refilled for less than $600, but she has no idea what I’m talking about and just monologues about how congress needs to take on the pharmaceutical companies. (which I don’t disagree with, but it’s not helping me resolve my current issue).
tl;dr: I need a new doctor.
YES
YES YOU DO
yes, you need a new doctor. Lemme tell you my “I need a new doctor” story.
I’ve had coldsores all my life, caught the herpes from my parents, no big deal. (Well, mouth lesions are pretty annoying/painful but not life-threatening.) I was trying to get my doctor to prescribe me a topical ointment or something, anything, and he says he has to do the blood test to confirm the herpes first. Fine, he orders the test, and luckily (lol) I had a large outbreak when I went in for the test, so I figured I had it in the bag.
This fucker misread the test, says I don’t have herpes, and attributes my coldsores to gastric reflex. THIS MAN WHO WENT TO MEDICAL SCHOOL THOUGHT ACID WAS JUMPING OUT OF MY STOMACH AND BURNING MY LIPS.
I later went to urgent care and was like, help? That dude looked at my record, saw the test results, read them correctly, and gave me antivirals, which was better than nothing.
Yes, you do. You should also have them check your appendix. My father had persistent back pain and apparently he had chronic appendicitis all this time. Apparently your appendix can flip over behind your intestines? Useless organ, you are the worst.
Uuuuuuugh this is so infuriating. Best of luck finding a new doctor!!
Posting anonymously for privacy: I just found out after a stressful few months (me: major move, money issues, no transportation, isolation from my support network, insecurity/ anxiety, boyfriend having major life issues too) that my boyfriend’s brain tumor is growing. It’s rare, possibly hard to treat, even hard to biopsy, so there’s so much uncertainty on top of an already hard situation. I’m actually a cancer survivor (just hit my 5 year mark), so I understand on that end, but I’m so freaked out about how to be a good support person, especially since I’m already depleted as hell. I can’t stop crying since he told me yesterday. Help?
Oh, hugs, if they are your thing.
Seconding the recommendation to take care of yourself. Please do use the Toast Reddit or the Toast Slack to vent and crowdsource help, if you need to.
OH HONEY
I’m so sorry. <3
Oof. I am so sorry, Violet. Offering more hugs if you would like them, and permission to care about your well-being, which is *important.*
Oh, sweet ones, I’m sorry about this!
A) you have permission – ENCOURAGEMENT! – to cry and mourn and feel like crap about this right now
B) being a good support person isn’t something you have to plan out in advance. Your directive is “love the man, give the man what you can, protect a corner of yourself while you’re at it.” The logistics of it will vary depending on what he needs anyway, so don’t freak out that you have to prepare a bunch in advance.
C) Never forget the protecting your corner part. You can laugh and relax and scream and have your own crap to deal with, big crap or little crap, doesn’t matter, because you are a person before you are a support person, and he knows that.
D) look for things that replenish you, singly and as a couple. Anything. Get a snowcone. Hop on slack (there are channels for health / mental health as well as ones with a million adorable pet pics, etc) or twitter and feed yourself joy and distraction and a network of supportive people. Make a money plan so you feel a sense of control over where that’s going. Sit in the sun and listen to kids laugh or pets romp or birds chirp or whatever can drill a few moments of happiness into you.
Until then, cry when you need to cry. Best wishes.
Sending you so much love and support. It is so hard being a support person, especially when you’ve become used to being the one which the bad shit which needs supporting.
If you can, try to take some time each day where you don’t think about it and don’t feel guilty for not thinking about it. Just a pocket of time that’s for you and only you and filled with whatever it is that makes you feel whole.
I’m so, so sorry. *gentle hug* Dakmiel has given excellent advice. All I can say is, don’t get so lost in anticipatory grieving that you lose the moment or play out your respurces. And get whatever help you can. Some kind of external support somewhere, especially of the professional variety if you can, but also someone who is willing to be texted at any time just to provide a mental hug.
Hugs if wanted. So sorry you’re going through this. Remember to put on your own oxygen mask first. <3
Thank you all so much. For everything
Oh man. I don’t know where I’m going on the Internet come July 2nd, where I will find a safe place to be a woman in the comments section, or where I will spend each hour of my morning, but I just want to thank everyone here for being smart and funny and warm and wonderful and for being the light in my life when I really needed it.
My life has lots of little things that could get better (a new job, an idea of how I want to spend the next 5 years, working up the nerve to tell my man friend I am totally falling for him) but right now I just want to ruminate on all the great stuff that has been published here, all the great comments i have read, and all the great people that come here each day. Danke and good night!
I don’t know where I’m going on the Internet come July 2nd, where I will find a safe place to be a woman in the comments section
This is the only site I’ve ever really felt safe commenting in. So many other places, it feels either like you’re making yourself vulnerable to unpleasant internet strangers or it’s just a bunch of people leaving comments that seem like yelling into a void without any sense of a community.
Same. I know it took so much work to moderate the comments, but it made this place so wonderful. There are so many people and voices here that I don’t think we could have gotten in another place that wasn’t made to be safe.
Toastieslack!
MASSIVE TRAVEL RECS THREAD
One of my favorite regular features of open thread was people sharing travel tips and recommendations – so let’s let that all out every last piece of advice we have!
Favorite trips, places, restaurants, sites, adventures, travel memories, dream trips that haven’t happened yet, hometown favs – tell us everything we should go do, so when we finally do, we can smile at one last gift from our fellow toasties.
Dream trip is a walking holiday in Scotland. One of these years.
I would love to do a walking or biking holiday. Oh man.
Mine is a “rambling” trip through English countryside near the coast, stopping into many pubs with cool names.
Great idea!
Ask me for recs if you’re interested in: Providence, Boston + area, Portland ME, Milwaukee, or Tokyo
And please give me recs for: Washington, DC, Toronto, and Seattle!
You guys are always the best at this.
I would love to hear your Portland ME recs! Food or stuff to do or both!
Yess! I am not a local but I visit fairly regularly. Mostly food recs, because that’s what I love to do, but some sightseeing stuff as well.
– Italian food: Paciarino. Simple food but done perfectly– not “cheap eats” but for something of comparable quality in, say, Boston, you’d probably pay triple. Super friendly, but they fill up quickly so either go late or call a day or two in advance for reservations.
– Ramen: Pai Men Miyake. Their tofu buns and Tokyo abura ramen are both on the “best thing I ever ate” shortlist. I have made a trip to Maine just to eat here.
– Donuts: Holy Donut. Why are these so good? They just are!
– Beer: Novare Res has such an amazing selection, so even if you “don’t like beer” you might be able to find a beer that you love. This place was my introduction both to sours and to salt-brewed beers.
– Being nautical: the mail boat tour is a favorite– it’s much cheaper than other harbor cruises because it’s a functioning mail boat. You can BYOB– pick up a six pack of beer or Moxie and a box of Holy Donuts and have a lovely afternoon.
Hope this is useful! The food recs are skewed vegetarian-friendly, because I am.
I am flying into Porland ME in 2 weeks and then driving to some tiny town for a wedding, and I Will now be stopping at the holy donut on my way out of town. THANK YOU IN ADVANCE. 🙂
I’d love to know what your Tokyo recs are (unfortunately, I cannot offer recs for the cities you name in return)
So of course Tokyo is a huuuuuuge city, and even though I’ve been thrice I’ve barely seen a fraction of it, but here are some things I like quite a bit and would/will do again.
– Hamarikyu gardens are gorgeous, historically interesting, surprisingly good for wildlife spotting (for the city), and very unique because of the salt-water irrigation system. They’re walking distance from Tsukiji fish market, too, which is a bit touristy but great for snacks.
– Shinjuku is tons of fun to visit for shopping, but I highly recommend going a little out of the way to the Shinjuku NS Building for dinner around sunset. There are a ton of reasonably-priced restaurants on the top floor with phenomenal views of the city. (For Shinjuku shopping, I’m partial to the Marui Annex (or OIOI? I’m never sure how to type it out) near Shinjuku park– I always find amazing gifts for people there)
– Omotesando is a neighborhood right next to Harajuku, a little quieter but just as fun to wander. The architecture is amazing and there’s some good food– this crepe place is delightful.
– Asakusa is a big temple surrounded by little shops– the rice crackers they sell there are called sembei and they’re quite good! Also a good gift option. If you go during any holiday or festival, the place is also stuffed to the gills with food vendors. You can catch a river cruise at Asakusa, which is a lovely way to spend an evening.
Hope this is helpful! I could go on, but I wanted to limit it to slightly less commonly-mentioned places.
LETS TALK ABOUT BREAKFAST:
Tin Pan Galley, Sacketts Harbor, NY
Parker’s Maple Barn, Mason, NH
Agate Alley Bistro, Eugene OR (heinous wait times, bomb french toast)
First Alleyway’s Full English Breakfast, Gwangju, South Korea (but if it’s hot out and you want to be a little more authentic just find a kimbap shop that sells Naengmyeon)
Salt and Pepper, Worcester MA
Waffle Frolic, Ithaca NY (open late, good anytime)
Ok I had three other PNW places on here and my notes for all of them are “french tooooasssst” so just know that the Pacific Northwest makes the best French Toast in America, I guess?
Except for TPG.
There are supposedly some great waffles in Salt Lake City but my dad made us go to Denny’s that morning.
The Waterfront Depot in Florence, OR has the best crab cakes on the planet.
Scandelicious – Vancouver. BC. It’s like crepes – but with waffles! My favorite was a fluffy, perfect waffle topped with smoked salmon, dill, capers, thinly sliced red onion and an amazingly perfect lemon creamy sauce (hollandaise maybe?). So, so good. As was the waffle with strawberries and thick cream.
For brunch in Portland (OR), I like Redwood solely for theior potato pancakes. Their like little birds nest potato noodle hashbrown things. Crunchy and creamy. Also broder nord.
Hannahfish – are you new england or PNW based? You make me want to discuss the glory of breakfast foods all day, and then eat them.
I have been based in both place!
(and apparently I need to base myself near Vancouver because HOLY COW I want those waffles)
Broderrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Now I want to eat aebleskivers until I explode.
Olga’s Cup and Saucer in Providence, RI — biscuits and scones and grits and everything dripping in cheese and butter, but somehow in a refined way.
Here are some pieces from the travelogue I wrote ten years ago from the Burgomaster’s and my 2007 trip to Italy.
“Travel Tip: When your party says they will meet you “under the lions” in San Marco Square, be sure to clarify which lions they are talking about. Venice’s mascot (for lack of a better term) is a winged lion. Lions are everywhere. Be sure you know under which lion(s) you are supposed to wait. The square is very open, but it is also very large and teeming with tourists and pigeons and way too many lions. I didn’t get a photo of the lion that we were supposed to meet at (which, for the record, is the one I guessed) because by the time the rest of our party arrived, we were ready to get the hell out of San Marco Square already.”
and
“Travel Tip: This one is serious. Promise. Venice has about a zillion different museums, and a lot of them are privately owned. This means that the 20 euro museum pass won’t get you in. After spending three days in Venice and bypassing several museums because of the insane lines, a person might wonder why she spent nearly forty dollars on a museum pass when she only managed to get into three museums. Do Not Be This Person. That expensive museum pass is expensive because it allows you to bypass the museum lines. Those lines are for people who were too cheap to buy the pass. Too bad we didn’t realize this until we got back to Milan.”
So if anyone’s planning to go to Venice in the near future…
Current dream trip: a cruise around New England and Canada, which is something my brain just suddenly latched onto a few months back and won’t let go of.
Other dream trip: Switzerland
I love to go to Ann Arbor Michigan to just hang out at a bed and breakfast and eat delicious foods. It is the most wonderful low-key vacation ever. We stay at the Burnt Toast Inn (!) which in addition to its name, is also just super great. It is not cheap (especially if you always have to stay in the room with the enormous soaking tub, which I absolutely do), but worth it. While in Ann Arbor, I always buy a book at Literati, do something fun in the river, and then eat/drink at a new selection of restaurants every time. Last time we went, I think Sava’s was our favorite.
And I live in Columbus Ohio which is not a tourist destination by any means, but is secretly a really nice city and I have a rotating list of my favorite Columbus things, should anybody find themselves here (that list is predictably longer than my Ann Arbor list and therefore harder to rattle off while I’m at work!).
I have a friend who lives in Ann Arbor and I’ve visited several times, mostly in October-ish. As a Southern Californian that is THE BEST time, because unlike at home, the leaves are turning colors. I can’t get enough Zingermans (usually the roadhouse) but that’s nothing secret.
I really want to go on a hiking and camping trip to Norway or Finland one day.
When I went to Venice, one of my friends got a book about places in Venice that are supposedly haunted, and we walked around at night trying to find them. That was fun!
Norway is soooooo greattttttt
But do save up your pennies as it is $$$$$. Like, I thought it would be sort of regular-Europe expensive, but no. We ate picnic food for our entire honeymoon. 🙂
Oh, I am so here for this. Some of my favorite trips have included taking a cooking class in Marrakesh, a small boat cruise to less famous Greek islands, lounging artfully from meal to meal in Savannah, GA and New Orleans, buying cheeses the size of my torso on the French side of St. Martin for, like, pocket change, and coming up with a definitive personal ranking of both chocolate shops and fry stands in Brussels, Belgium.
I have extensive restaurant recommendation spreadsheets for New York, London, Brussels, Washington DC, New Orleans, and east Tennessee, among others. These are sortable by diveyness, veg-friendliness, etc., and I’ll yammer about those any time with v little prompting.
One of my current favorite travel tricks is making a custom google map of points of interest/restaurants before departure. In general, am a super big fan of extensive research before leaving, then winging it while at the destination armed with that research. This helps prevent decision paralysis and/or endless waffling before leaving the hotel, like, four hours later than you planned, without feeling like you’re on a package tour. Food research starting points: Chowhound, Eater, Road Food, Time Out, local food bloggers. Slow Travel Berlin is pretty keen all around.
Dream trips: there’s a secular hermitage in a remote spot in Italy, a food writing/cooking workshop in Sicily, and the Dorothy Dunnett Society has written a Lymondian guide to Edinburgh. If I start dreaming really big, I think about Thailand/Cambodia, Argentina, South Africa, Jordan, New Zealand, etc etc etc.
Basically, if I could spend all my money on travel, food, and books about all those things, I would.
Get yourselves to New Zealand if you can. It’s the most beautiful country I’ve seen (I live in the suburbs of Chicago) and I just love the general…feel of it. Wellington is neat. Kaikoura, which is on the south island, is friggin’ gorgeous.
My trip was both the most amazing thing I’ve ever done and the most painful (at the time) because I was crushing very hard on a New Zealander gentleman but he was with another girl, so I pretty much wept every day I was there because my heart was oh so very sad.
I wound up marrying him four years later.
So I might be going to New Zealand this fall….if I think I can afford it. My questions: how expensive, relatively, did you find it? And what would you recommend while there?
I’ve mentioned it before, but Toasters interested in riding trips at any and all levels should check out Equitours. I’ve ridden trips they’ve vetted in Texas, Quebec, Scotland, Argentina, Mexico, and Ecuador, and all of them have been fantastic: well-treated, well-trained horses; properly maintained tack; good logistical support; and lodgings/food/difficulty/gear/itineraries consistent with the descriptions on the site. If you want to go riding somewhere but don’t want to end up on scrawny saddle-sored hard-mouthed nags in ancient half-repaired tack trudging along in single file, Equitours is the ticket.
I haven’t seen anyone post it, but just in case – there will be a Chicagoland Toast Wake on Friday. Deets in the FB group, or feel free to email me at [myusername] at gmail. We’ll laugh, we’ll cry, we’ll talk about monks.
Job hunting Toasties, might I recommend this week’s Irrelevant Show? The sketch starting at about 7:15 is a delight. http://www.cbc.ca/radio/irrelevantshow/irrelevant…
This is actually pretty good, and made all the better because it’s something good on CBC comedy! Thanks for this.
YOU GUYS WHY DIDN’T ANYONE TELL ME ABOUT WYNONNA EARP
I’m on episode six`. It is so, so good. My only wish would be for it to be gayer, and I’m pretty sure that’s about to happen! Is anyone else watching this?
Spoiler: It gets gayer! I loved it, although I do think they messed up pretty bad in the finale with one character, but not enough to make me not want to watch a second season. It’s just good, dumb, supernatural Canadian fun.
HURRAY I just love this show so much. It reminds me of the first season of Sleepy Hollow, except with more bad romantic/sexual decisions and more queer characters and more Canadian accents. Which, honestly, is 95% of what I look for in a television show.
SAME.
LOVE Wynonna Earp. It is completely ridiculous and often makes no sense, but it’s so fun and gay and easy. I really hope it gets renewed, because 13 episodes is not enough.
I recently saw this described as the anti-Supernatural, and I’ve been meaning to watch it ever since. All I need now is time.
I’m in. Supernatural was getting less and less funny and then they killed my favorite non-Winchester and I was DONE.
so, so good. trying to hold off watching the last two episodes because i dont want to not have it in my life.
I watched the first ep and was not especially into it (although I wanted to be). Should I give it a few more?
I would say definitely yes! (depending on which aspects you didn’t like of the pilot)
It is a poorly-plotted Feminist Kinda Gay Supernatural Western. If you can’t deal with nonsense plotting it’s probably Not For You, but if you liked Lost Girl at its most WTF you should probably give Wynonna Earp another shot.
I definitely liked Lost Girl. Clearly I should revisit 🙂
My goddaughter is being delivered today…3 weeks early due to complications. It’s really hard being an ocean away from your family. Please send good vibes to this little future big hair no heart baby.
This preemie mama sends good vibes! 3 weeks is totally chill (depending on what the complications are, of course) – I hope and expect the lil’ baby will be home pronto.
Because I’m running out of time to get advice from you lovely people: Help me figure out a problem I am having with in-laws and nicknames??
Specifically, my in-laws have a nickname for my 3-year-old that I haaate. It’s a babyish version of her name, the thing she called herself when she was not quite 2 and couldn’t pronounce her consonants. Now she can say her name just fine, but her in-laws have adopted this nickname to the extent that I haven’t heard them call her by her real name in at least 6 months+. And it’s becoming a thing: The nickname happens to be the same name of a cartoon character, and my MIL started buying my daughter books with that character. (She doesn’t watch the show, it’s just because of the ‘shared’ name.)
So I know I’m being petty as hell, and I just have to suck it up, right? Background is that in-laws are very sweet and I should probably count my blessings, but they have been pushy in the past about getting some sort of grandparent fantasy life in which we leave our kids with them all the time. My MIL has literally asked me six times in an hour if I was suuuuure I didn’t have to go anywhere so she could babysit — right after I got home from nearly two hours of running errands and letting her babysit. She effectively took over my daughter’s first birthday by showing up with decorations and a special birthday outfit (she does this with all holidays). Because of this, I think the nickname thing feels disrespectful to me, like they want to name her, too. On the other hand, I doubt they see it that way at all. So. Something I should let go, probably?
Maybe I spend too much time reading DWIL but this actually sounds like a good time to set & enforce boundaries. E.g.: “We’re excited that Kid is growing up and can say her full name now! We gave her that name and it means a lot to us; we’d like you to use it too.” I guess it also depends on how much time your in-laws spend around other people in your social circle – if you think the nickname might spread to other family members & friends, would definitely shut it down. If you think it’ll only be two people using it, I might consider giving them some slack. But I’d still be mad – names are important!
Haha, I read DWIL, too! I’m sure if I asked there I’d be told to cut them off. 😛 That’s a good point about the nickname spreading. My SIL uses it occasionally, and my in-laws have used it with, like, waiters, which isn’t super-important but does drive me nuts. So it’s something to keep an eye on. Thanks!
I think you should definitely work on setting some boundaries regarding babysitting and perhaps gifting, but it also seems like family nicknames (and friend nicknames) are things that happen frequently so you really need to decide if that’s the hill you want to die on (and if the cartoon is a popular one among your daughter’s age group, it might be a nickname she ends up with once she hits school/it might be a name she pushes back on herself at some point because “babyish”). Regardless of if you decide to let it slide or not, I think it’s 100% fair to make sure MIL is clear that it’s a family-only nickname and she shouldn’t be introducing your daughter by anything other than her full name.
Yeah, part of my hesitation is that I have now pushed back on the babysitting and other issues, and so I wonder if this is somewhere I should let go. It’s just that it’s become such an emotional automatic cringe every time I hear it! It may be that if I tell them to keep it within the family, they might chill out on it a little bit in general. I need to think about that.
I don’t have kids, so maybe take this with a grain of salt, but I think that’s a perfectly acceptable place to Shut It Down. My virulence about it stems from when my sister was little and my grandparents insisted on a derivative of her name that my mom hated, to the extent of getting it embroidered on pillows and that sort of thing. Particularly given the in-law’s tendency towards being somewhat controlling in other areas, it seems like the name is a perfectly good example of boundary-setting. (Also, if it were me I would feel much more ok with it if they used the name now and again, while still using her actual name. Using it to the exclusion of her real name feels . . a bit much).
This is exactly it! The total exclusion of her real name. And I can completely see my in-laws doing something like your grandparents did, because they love monograming. That is definitely a line in the sand for me.
You can also ask your kid if she likes it? I have a short name and there are two possible nicknames people try and use and I shut them both down, even as a small child, but I think if I were less strong willed it’s entirely possible I’d still have people who knew me as that name, which would have been a more infantilizing one.
I don’t know what end of the willful assertive spectrum your kid is on but I’d be like, “what is your name? Do you like it when grammy calls you [nickname]?” If she says no, I’d let her take the lead. “Hey grandma Jean, lately Caroline has been really into saying her whole name, and we’re going to respect that, so please stop calling her Carrie, ok?” Let your kid throw a temper tantrum about this one thing and back her up. “Oh honey its ok, I’m sure your grandma will be happy to call you Caroline…”
In my experiences with toddlers, once you let them make a choice, they really like to stick to it, and age and names are very important. One of my favorite 4 year olds also like to insist on what species everyone is that day- sometimes we’re all snakes, sometimes were kangaroos.
So my response is, be petty as hell if your kid wants you to.
I like the idea of asking her opinion. I had kind of hoped she’d naturally push back — she’s extremely opinionated — but so far, no. Thank you!
Also, just donate the books unless she loves them. Just because you get given a gift, doesn’t mean you have to keep them. If you ditch anything with the nickname on it, it’s going a long way to keep it from spreading about.
I dunno, I don’t have very useful advice, probably, but I guess my gut instinct is that if it was just the nickname, I might let it go on the grounds that they were the only two people who were going to use it and they weren’t going to try to get it to spread to the rest of the family or whoever. At the same time, I would probably try to help them start to phase it out as your kid gets older and starts maybe wanting to be called by her own name.
But on the other hand, they sound like they’re a little bit bad with boundaries and being pushy about what they want over what you’ve asked, so it might not be the worst idea to draw a couple boundaries anyway, and this is a pretty low-stakes request to hold firm on, maybe, as a starting point. Maybe, I dunno.
Story: When my brother was about two, he couldn’t pronounce my name and it came out “Sissa,” which my mother then turned into “Sissy” for him to say. He dropped that as soon as he could pronounce my name when he was about five (handling S sounds came a little late for him). My mother, on the other hand, still calls me Sissy, especially when she wants to reassure herself of a close familial bond (that doesn’t really exist). It drives me a little nuts, but I know that for her, if I told her to stop, she’d hear that as me telling her that I don’t want to be a close member of the family anymore. So maybe that’s why I’m a little more in the “feel free to say no” camp.
Thanks! Yeah, there’s something about nicknames that can be used by someone trying to sort of fake a relationship. Part of what’s going on with this is along those lines. My in-laws tend to romanticize things and put the kids on a pedestal. Grandparents should dote on their grandkids, of course, a little spoiling is fine, but sometimes it’s like their perception of the kids isn’t really relevant to the kids themselves — they’re just generic perfect angels. The nickname feels a little like that, with the willful ignoring of the fact that she’s past that baby-lisp stage.
Ugh, I dunno. Thanks to you and to everyone else for giving me some different ways to look at it! It’s really helpful.
Yeah, my mother definitely still does it to fake a relationship, and one in which she can reimagine me as the progression from that five-year-old who let their three-year-old brother call them “Sissy” because he couldn’t pronounce my name into the person she imagined me growing up to be. (Hyperfeminine, very traditional, nurturing and family-oriented and homemaking.)
(In my case, I also sometimes kind of want to point out that using that nickname for me is essentially just defining who I am as just “[Brother]’s older sister.”)
No, you shouldn’t let it go. One, it’s your kid, they should call her what you want them to call her, which is her real name.
Two, what adults say sticks with kids that age forever. My bouncy daughter (who had limited contact with my MIL for many reasons), was about 2 and wouldn’t go over and give this strange lady a hug. MIL said, “oh, that’s all right, she’s just shy”. Now, for reference, she wanted to “do karate like Gavin” (her big brother) at TWO. We had to tell her that karate starts at 3, and she went on her third birthday to her first class. This is not a shy kid. Until Gma opened her big *&%$ mouth and my daughter DIDN”T TALK ABOVE A WHISPER FOR 6 YEARS to anybody but mom/dad/brothers/my mom. She totally and completely believed that grandma knew she was “shy” (a label I never would use), she is a grandma, grandmas know, and could not get over that for years and after a lot of therapy. I still wish that woman evil, for many many reasons, but that one especially. kids are impressionable, don’t let the impressions be from a place you don’t approve of.
sorry, rant over.
Oh geez, poor kid. Yeah, the labeling thing can be so influential, and I appreciate the wisdom of a mom with experience!
I agree with the suggestions to ask your daughter about it, and then enforce or not enforce as she wishes. I grew up with a first name that is frequently shortened and never let people shorten it, and a middle name that my family called me by until I started school and they wanted to reinforce the one name I was called by at school. (Not sure why, though.) Kids have opinions about what you call them.
I also would suggest asking your daughter. My MIL doesn’t like a nickname for her daughter’s name (think Beth or Jenny) and gets very testy when people use the nickname, even though it’s actually her daughter’s preferred name.
I found this article about bad ideas and why they find traction with people very interesting. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jun/28/w…
This may have been talked about further down thread, but did anyone see this article in the NYTimes this morning about the abandoned house of former Russian spies in New Jersey and immediately think that it should be purchased by a Toast Collective and made into a retreat space?
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/28/nyregion/spy-ho…
We could watch spy movies and Nicole could lead post-film discussions. and Montclair is v near Maplewood, which has an excellent book store (my aunt works there) and a great bakery.
WORDS! My BF used to work there.
I would support this.
I’m still terrified about the EU referendum result. I’ve signed the petitions, I’ve written to my MP… I can’t stop catastrophising. Big things scare me – the idea of the EU as a whole breaking up, the rise of the far right everywhere – and more personal things, like how fucked I’ll be if inflation shoots up and house prices fall and I can’t afford my mortgage or even to sell the place. Just can’t stop spiralling. And when I talk to anyone who isn’t terrified, I don’t feel reassured – just that they’re not scared enough. Argh.
My boyfriend is feeling rather similar. He feels like his whole belief system has crashed to the ground and he’s terrified about what is going to happen next. I’ve been feeling this way ever since we voted the Tories into power in 2010, so I think I haven’t been hit with the shock as much as he has. You aren’t alone in your fear and worry though, and I hope there is some small comfort in that, though maybe not. He and I have agreed to start volunteering for something (not necessarily EU-related) so as to feel less impotent, and to attempt to put something good back into this fractured community we’ve found ourselves in.
I’m really sorry though. I wish I could make it so everyone on both sides felt secure and happy and united. It hearts my heart so much to see this divide.
Complete sympathies on this. Brexit is also playing havoc with my (already rampant) anxiety and causing some genuinely weird things to happen inside my head. I know it’s particularly harrowing when it gets so total that it doesn’t feel safe to accept reassurance from others.
I don’t have advice or anything really but just…catastrophising solidarity (I suppose, if that’s a thing)
I’m confused…why do you think inflation will be bad for you as a houseowner when you own a debt with a fixed interest rate?
They might have a tracker mortgage, that would suck.
Yeah – like IronDoe says, I don’t have a fixed interest rate.
Toasts! In these waning moments, I have a request that this community is uniquely qualified to help with: My brother-in-law is open to learning about the ways in which all men are complicit in structural sexism, but is unconvinced.
What reading do you recommend? He is biased towards more authoritative-seeming sources (ie journals, books) vs. blogs, which, yes, we could also delve into, but in the interest of convincing this person to whom I am forced to be related, I shall not.
Thank you, I love you, I am searching the Toast archives.
bell hooks, maybe? She does some really great thinking about masculinity and the ways it contributes to structural sexism. Julia Serrano’s Whipping Girl is a really _really_ great primer for how society generally devalues femininity, and lucidly presents how that systemic devaluation is a very strong component of keeping women down. It totally changed the way I thought about femininity, and helped me (continue to) deal with some residual internalized misogyny.
You may also want to check out peer-reviewed studies about systemic discrimination when on the job hunt? Something like this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC25720…
But seriously, dude, like, half the population telling you that a problem exists means that it probably exists, and you’d have less of a hard time believing that if you didn’t believe patriarchal lies about women’s truth-telling abilities.
Thank you for the suggestions, bell hooks is of course the right place to start. Also for the “but seriously, dude.”
Harvard Business Review recently researched the sexism of men: https://hbr.org/2016/06/are-u-s-millennial-men-ju…
I mean, some people won’t take even stats and figures as truth. There will always be another hurdle that you’ll have to surmount to “convince” someone. Each data point you provide isn’t enough, they always have an excuse for why it doesn’t apply to them or doesn’t apply globally, or it’s not the case because the study didn’t take “x” or “y” into account.
You might, if you have a good relationship with him, try “if I was a man, you wouldn’t require me to provide authoritative sources to validate my lived experiences. You would accept my words as truthful automatically, and that is an example of how you, dearest BIL, are complicit in structural sexism.”
But I feel you because I have many relatives to whom I wish I could say the above, but don’t and just keep my mouth shut. Patriarchy 🙁
UGH, that Harvard Business Review article! How do we ensure that these tits don’t run everything 40 years from now? *spits*
For a brief moment, I took you literally and thought you were summing up the sexism discussed in the article. [looks down at chest] And then I remembered the other use of the word “tit.” LOL
Thanks for the link, the suggested language, and the reality check.
He is a new BIL and we have not yet established much of a relationship, which really was not helped by my yelling “Fucking let me speak, goddamnit!” as I spilled a bowl of chips on him during a discussion of whether all men are oppressors that was heavily punctuated by him interrupting me.
He did, however, email asking for reading material, and I do very much want to remain close to my sister, so I am not at the point of writing him off.
I have and had to do the same “find the right sources” thing with my partner, brother, dad, and others close to me, so I definitely sympathize. We talk about how women are responsible for more emotional labour – and then to get a man to even consider the issue you have to do the actual labour of searching for facts and studies to prove that women provide more emotional labour. Unending cycle!
If you can teach and show and prove for your BIL, then it’s worth it. But remember that it’s not your responsibility to make him understand. If he wants to learn for real, he’ll search out the resources too. Maybe ask him to be part of the research process. Ask him to find sources or articles that he wants to discuss. (WARNING: One Guy brought C. Sommers as a “feminist” source for discussion. So I had to go down the rabbit hole debunking THAT one)
For interrupting, yeah it’s a problem. Sometimes being silent and writing down your points (I have a tendency to forget them as I move from issue to issue) and then being all “are you done interrupting me? It’s not a discussion if you won’t let me speak my part” helps. See how he treats other men in a discussion. Then demand that sort of respect and point out the difference.
It’s always a plus to stand up for feminism and against sexism, but your mental and emotional health matters too! Good luck!
I just read Men Explain Things To Me, finally, which I found very surface-y – it was missing a lot of nuance on race/gender expression/class/ability etc. However, I think Rebecca Solnit does do some good work at illustrating the slippery slope of men’s more benign sexism – speaking over women, ignoring their experiences, etc – leading to serious violence. And if he’s book averse, the title essay is still knocking around the internet.
This Lindy West piece and the subsequent Vocal Fry piece on This American Life are good IRL examples of sexist bullshit. I think they both drive home the point that women get shit on for doing absolutely nothing other than going about their usual business, which is unfortunaely a realization many men have yet to make. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/ep…
The Second Sex (Simone de Beauvoir) is also a fine place to start, especially if he has antiquated assumptions in the first place.
Open Thread = sharing the Toast Connections spreadsheet, complete with instructions for finding Toasties on Twitter, Slack, and Reddit
Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu!
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/innovator…
I just read about this on the train this morning and thought this would be the perfect place. After Islamic radicals took over Timbuktu, Abdel Kader Haidara, the founder of the major historical library in that city, created an underground railroad to smuggle ancient books into a safer area. It’s an amazing story!
Y’all, Pat Summitt has died at 64. 🙁
RIP.
Holy shit, what is UP with 2016?!
I think all the awesome people are getting out while they still can. Whatever’s coming, they saw it and noped the hell right out of here.
subject: Radiolab
I listened to the “Debatable” episode and when the brilliant young dude they were interviewing just told Robert to “stop — you need to stop” I WAS FILLED WITH GLEE.
(Robert was expressing sympathy for people who were having their racism pointed out to them. Robert gets under my skin. I would love Radiolab so much if there were a plugin that auto skipped Robert’s portions.)
The episode is pretty fantastic. Competitive debate! Anything that takes you inside insular, intense little worlds is so great, and this little world is filled with brave people who simply won’t take your BS any longer.
Oooooh I swore off Radiolab after Yellow Rain (and returned briefly but only to hear a clip where they described someone as “only 2% [Native American tribe]” and “I was like ohh, um, no, that’s some old racist bullshit and not a thing y’all. I cannot.” So I am so excited for the opportunity to hear that old stickler nerd get shouted down.
Yeah I also left off for a long time after Yellow Rain. WTH ROBERT???? I hate his “common sense” shtick in general but that was so callous. I stopped supporting the podcast and wrote them an email about it.
And then there was also that time they ran the very disturbing story about the self-absorbed woman spying on her neighbors that she saw through the window, as if it were a beautiful tale about…. stalking! People.
But recent very long car trips prompted me to download a few and try again. I just do my own Robert-skipping a lot.
I have complicated, and probably ultimately pointless, opinions about the “Adoptive Couple vs. Baby Girl” episode. Ugh. I just can’t even.
Right?? Like, they bring in folks who are “authorities” on subjects all the time – why wouldn’t they get in folks well versed in these issues?
I have a long-running problem with Radiolab and the way they often talk about humanities topics as if they’re just weird ideas you have while studying science, like there aren’t experts they could consult on the cultural/historical/sociological/philosophical questions they raise on the show. I think that might have been getting better since they’ve been doing more shows about topics that aren’t in the physical sciences.
On this latest episode, which was the first one I’d listened to in a long time, it really struck me how Robert was behaving a lot like the white debaters who were being critiqued. He assumed the same above-it-all posture that the performative debaters were specifically pointing out as anti-black. No one seemed to explicitly point that out in the episode, even though Jad commented on how the star debater was disagreeing with Robert about everything.
You put it very well!
That is just what I mean by Robert’s “common sense” tone — as if it is just so obvious that everyone would agree with his eminently reasonable, neutral opinions.
I’m sorta borrowing this sense of “common sense” from ‘Against Common Sense: Teaching and Learning Toward Social Justice’ By Kevin Kumashiro, which points out that “common sense” is the logic of the status quo, of dominant norms.
Does anyone have good recipes for fresh turmeric root?
I bought some at the farmer’s market, and they were only selling large packets of it. So far I have been making tea with fresh ginger and fresh turmeric combined, and it is delicious, but I’d like to mix ti up. Should I be grating it into my seafood dishes? Or grating it into pots of rice? Or is there anything more interesting to be done?
excited for all my anti-inflammatory health benefits but wanting it to be delicious, too—
Do you do smoothies? Because you can chuck some into smoothies.
I know someone who swears by turmeric milk… http://www.turmericforhealth.com/turmeric-recipes…
I love turmeric milk! But I also love the flavor of turmeric, so.
Do you like Indian food? It is not necessarily complicated to cook. Since most studies of turmeric benefits used curcumin at higher amounts than found in natural turmeric, I unscientifically figure that you ought to use enough to taste it to get any kind of benefit. Therefore, Indian food!
My fave way of doing turmeric beverage is a spice tea of turmeric and any “warm” spices on hand — clove, cinnamon, allspice, anise — and very very tiny amount of salt, simmered in milk (non-dairy also good) then strained. Hot or iced, very nice!
ETA and sweetener!
thank you all! I foresee dal in my future as well as turmeric and warm spices tea. I had been hesitating to make Indian food because it seemed too rich for hot weather (despite… the obvious weather in India, I am not well adapted to rich food in hot weather), but an iced spiced tea sounds delightful, and so do maybe some lighter Indian recipes like dal.
Am going to try shaving it into seafood too! Turmeric, turmeric, everywhere. And yellow finger tips.
Curries! I love using fresh turmeric in this recipe: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/jan/…
(never bothered making the tapioca, fwiw)
Nasi goreng (Indonesian fried rice) uses turmeric. I use the ground version but I’m sure it would be tasty with the fresh root. It has a few other spices as well – cumin and coriander, sometimes lemongrass. I don’t have my mum’s recipe with me, but Google has several variations. It’s easy and delicious.
I was having trouble with Intense Debate earlier so I’m a little late with this: BUT everyone reading this who is in the Boston area, we are having a real-life Toast Wake in two days at The Friendly Toast (the Kendall one). Meet outside the entrance at 6:15 (I’ll be there at 6) and we’ll head in promptly at 6:30 to commiserate, eat and drink. Come, even if you have never been to a Boston Toast event before! Choose your favorite “If X Were Your Y” title as an intro, if you like. If you can see it, please RSVP to our Facebook invite https://www.facebook.com/events/1247920101884830/
Thank you for reposting! I was looking for this!
If anyone needs a hate read today: ugh. http://avc.lu/292cJAS
I have a lot of grief lately. From the news, and from the end of the Toast, but mostly from my roommate leaving.
She got into Columbia with generous funding (/brag) so OBVIOUSLY she moving to NYC. But we’ve been roommates for 5 years. She’s one of my best friends. We are, no joke, heterosexual life partners, and this is the worst breakup ever. She’s leaving August 10th and I can’t seem to do anything important like renegotiate the rent with the landlord or find a new roommate or switch the cat’s license to my name despite the ever-encroaching deadline.
So obviously we’re trying to spend a lot of time together, but I’m getting to a point where the rising tide of grief is really devastating the coastal communities of “getting things done” and “enjoying time with her” and “life in general.”
What do I do? How do I deal? Advice for friend breakups when you both still love each other?
Also, tangent: Seattle is gonna wake the Toast on Friday at 6pm at The Pine Box. Join us if you’re in the neighborhood!
Your friend will still exist! Its an LDR relationship now, but it’s still going to exist. I promise you. I have had to leave people behind and it’s always the worst but when they come visit it’s usually like nothing has changed, and traveling to be with friends is great fun. Start saving your pennnies now for a cheap weekend flight, make plans and keep them. Do phone calls, send care packages, watch the same movies. Read what people in LDRS do. It’s going to be OK, not great, but OK.
Aw, man. I am so sorry to hear that you’ll have to be separate from your friend. But I have to tell you, this is not actually a friend breakup.
It’s not that it doesn’t suck–it sucks lots. It will be hard to not have her in the same city, and to not have her share your home. You may not be able to talk as much as you used to, and it isn’t the same to hang out at a distance. All these things are worth grieving for.
But she is still your friend, and you two love each other. You will continue to be friends, even with the distance. You haven’t lost her, and your friendship is not over.
Brookelet, I am so sorry about your situation and I really, really sympathize. That kind of seismic change in a close relationship – I honestly don’t know how folks weather those without at lot of tears and sorrow. In your case I think grief and denial are only natural. You can definitely stay friends in your new LDR form, but of course things won’t be the same. And you should allow yourself to mourn that inevitable, unavoidable change, even as you remember that it’s not *the end*.
At least, that’s what I’m telling myself. My situation has some parallels to yours: next week I’m leaving the country that’s been my home for 3 years (for the greater Seattle area – small world!), leaving behind one of the most important people in my life – my own roommate/heterosexual life partner – perhaps forever. Add to that all the recent horrible events in the world, the shuttering of The Toast, and a complete re-think of my entire life, I’m coping but *just* coping.
I think people generally undervalue the tremendous importance of close, supportive domestic relationships that aren’t built on romantic love or kinship ties. You built a life with your dear friend, so what’s coming is like a divorce or breakup without the bad feelings. On the other hand, your heterosexual life partner will still be your friend even when she’s in NYC. She’s not out of your life, just far away. It still sucks – believe me! – but change, even in foundational relationships, is inevitable. It’s not the end for the two of you.
Internet hugs if you want them!
It’s 9:45 and I’m still in my jammies on the couch. Summer is pretty great.
WHAT A PUPPY HELLO
I checked the circuit court records, and ex!boss has finally, finally been sentenced. It’s 10 years on each of the four counts (solicitation of a minor, for those who aren’t up on the entire saga), with a 5 year suspended sentence on each one. Although I’m not sure if those sentences are concurrent or consecutive, so idk if he’s looking at 10 or 40 years in jail. Either way, it’ll be a long time before he gets out, so I don’t have to worry that he’ll come around and try to be involved with the business again for at least 10 years, at which point I may very well not be working there any longer.
I needed to tell somebody that. Thank you to everybody who was so supportive when all of this started last January (Jesus Christ, that’s a long time ago); it was my only contribution to Open Threads for a long time, and you’re all the best.
Hooray! I hope he’s in prison a looong time. You deserve some good news.
Yeah, I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t actually care what happens to him, as long as he isn’t around. This will help him not be around. I’m just thrilled that there’s finally a resolution to this whole miserable situation.
GOOD.
*hug*
*hug*
[Smeagol is freeeeeee! .gif]
I’m glad you updated us.
I’m glad that there’s been such a wonderful community supporting me through this entire experience. That’s what I’m going to miss the most about the Toast.
Okay I did something REALLY SCARY today. I have an enormous dental phobia. Like looking at isolated smiles (photos cropped so you can only see the lips/teeth) is super upsetting to me, because it makes me think of teeth in general, and anything related to teeth triggers my phobia. I don’t like to talk about it.
As you might guess, I don’t like dentist offices or dental exams at all. I’m on the autistic spectrum with sensory integration trouble, and getting an exam or cleaning is torture because of the noises, vibrations, and that bright light in my face. BUT ALSO i really, really, really don’t like being held in place while lying down and guess what you have to do so you can have a successful dentist visit.
Anyway, I’ve been fighting a lot of anxiety in recent weeks for various reasons, and it was causing weird feelings in my mouth (pretty sure it was because my jaw was so tense), and I was afraid my teeth were falling out. Which caused more anxiety and a panic attack one day, because dental phobia. My mom did the maternal thing and looked for a dentist and scheduled appts for me.
The first appointment was today and I made it through with minimal crying! I mean, I was only going for X-Rays and a visual inspection to see if there were any major problems. But I still had a panic attack in the waiting room that crescendoed (or broke? like a fever breaks?) into sobbing on the short walk to the exam room and took like 30 minutes to fade out (it took forever for my dentist to get in there, possibly on purpose to let me feel safe in the room). And when they tilted the chair back so he could get a good preliminary look before X-rays, it was like a trigger for crying even though I was trying so hard to be stoic and good, and he only had the mirror not the spikey thing! (They didn’t tilt me back for the post-X-Ray exam.)
BUT I DID IT and even though I’m on the verge of anxious-phobia-tears remembering the visit, I made myself go and didn’t back down and I want to show off. 🙂
Plus, the dentist says I’ve got good teeth. It’s been 10+ years since I last had a cleaning, and I very rarely floss, but I don’t have any cavities or really any big problems. Just the problems that come from 10 years of not getting a good cleaning and also drinking too much cherry coke. (Which I’ve been trying to quit for years now.) (I go back in August for a cleaning. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I took SO MUCH valium last time and it was still a torturous experience, plus it made me zombieish, and my new dentist needs me alert.)
Oh I’m so sorry. And impressed. You did it! Overcame great hurdles. Can you enlist a friend to go with you to the next appointment? I get too frightened to communicate at some medical/dental visits. Mr Rose comes along sometimes to speak for me.
Thank you!
My mom is going with me, because she’s doing the calling, making appointments, etc., though it was frustrating the way she was talking for me today and giving a different impression than the truth. Like she was softening things to make things seem better? And she kept talking at me when I just wanted to be quiet to calm down.
It’s weird how when I’m alone and anxious, I can’t do anything and wish I had someone there to be my voice. And then when someone does help, I want them to go away because I’m perfectly capable of doing things myself. (Not just here – when I had a panic attack at work earlier this month and was like “oh god someone come help me” and then someone DID and i was like a stubbon two year old “no, let me do it” even as I was utterly incapable of counting the cash deposit I was supposed to be counting because the denominations on the bills made no sense to me.)
Maybe next time I’ll ask her to sit at the side of the room and small talk with the dentist so he doesn’t have to talk to me.
Oh my goodness, you could be me. My partner keeps telling me I need to go in for a checkup, because it’s been years and years, but every time I so much as think about it I want to cry. So many kudos for your bravery! Sending you many, many happy and calming thoughts.
Thank you!
And, yes, it was hard. Even just trying to pick an insurance plan last October was triggering, and I had to give the materials to my mom so she could tell me which box to check during open enrollment.
I wouldn’t have pressed to visit except the tension that made me feel like my teeth were falling out was so bad that I needed to visit just to reassure myself that they weren’t actually falling out (and, in fact, I got even better news than I expected).
Can you get your partner to do all the legwork for you and just tell you what day to go? Because tbh that’s what my mom did and she looked for someone known to be very gentle who has a history of working with phobic people. She also went to get a cleaning done and sent my sdad for a root canal with them before getting me an appointment, so that she would know first-hand what the practice is like. And my sdad also has a dental aversion (but not a full-on phobia) and he said the root canal “wasn’t bad”, so that’s a lot in their favor!
Sounds like you did amazing! You made it through! Does it help to see a dentist that has a TV on the ceiling or lets you wear headphones to listen to music?
Thank you!
I usually wear my headphones and an eye-mask (like a sleep mask? to block the bright light) and I hold a plushie and/or cat’s cradle string so that I don’t dig my fingernails into my skin. I didn’t this time because I wanted to be super casual about it. Unfortunately, when the vibratey tools are vibrating against my teeth, no amount of headphone sound can hide it, so I just have to bear it. 🙁
The dumb thing is that it isn’t a pain issue for me. it’s literally 100% sensory, which is hard to fix. And another 100% reclining and unable to move.
Congrats!!!!
In my experience, flossing has made the work the hygienist has to do when I get cleanings so much less painful/lengthy for me. They also let me know my teeth were better off because I’d been flossing 🙂
Haha, yeah, I was told that with the state of things I really should floss more than once or twice a year. My dental phobia extends to it, too, alas. I know logically that flossing prevents teeth falling out, but whenever I try, I’m convinced it’s going to pop them out like corn from a cob, so I don’t do it very well, and then the sensory difficulties I have mean I can’t do all my teeth in one go. (The pluck-pluck feeling makes me nauseous – I can’t use tweezers on my eyebrows either!)
Oh, well. I’m going to at least try to increase the amount of teeth brushing to offset that, and goal for flossing once a week to start. Maybe I’ll reward myself with a nice Fossil messenger bag if I succeed for two months or something. (I want the men’s bag so much for work, but it’s so expensive!)
Oooh sorry I didn’t think of that – of course it would be hard and unpleasant for you! Alternative suggestion – Waterpik? It squirts water in your mouth and is supposedly as good as flossing but you don’t actually have to get in there with floss.
And yes to treating yourself for dealing with hard shit. Even if it’s expensive.
I’m sooo defensive when my anxiety issues come up, so no worries on your part for mentioning it! As it happens, about 2 years ago, I was equally defensive about some exercise issues and also super negative and here I am biking 10+mi a week (I swore I could never bike six yards).
I figure that bag I want is expensive and I’m too careful with my money to buy it when I don’t need it, but it might be a good reward for changing my dental habits. I mean, it’s not something I would buy or do anyway (like promising myself a chocolate bar if I take my car for an oil change :P), so it’s a special treat.
Plus encouragement from you and others here + comparing to the exercise encouragement/success will help a lot.
Thank you!
Good for you!!!! I also have a bit of a dental phobia (the kind where I cry when I even think about going and so I haven’t been in years).
But your story has given me courage, and I will try to make an appointment soon. Concrete goal: find a dentist who will take my insurance by the end of this week.
Thank you!
I cry when I think about going, too. And get shakey and stuff. It’s awful, especially since there are so many social, unspoken reminders that it’s important.
Can you get someone to do the research and talk to the dentist office for you? That was the first hurdle for me, and trying to do it myself was impossible. Once I asked my mom and told her the timeline I wanted to be on, and explained how bad the phobia is, I was able to not think about it and just accept that it would be happening. She gave me just enough notice of the appointment date/time that I could arrange it with my work schedule, so that it wouldn’t be looming over me longer than necessary.
Having it be out of my hands, in a way, made it a lot easier. Like…not being responsible for subjecting myself to this awful thing makes it less harsh somehow? Maybe that will help you!
Oh that’s such a good idea, thank you! And I’m sorry you go through this too, but it’s nice to know I’m not the only one 🙂
Congratulations on getting through the visit, and making a follow up for August!
I suffer from anticipatory anxiety about a range of things, and dental treatments have been challenging for me at times. If you don’t already have a therapist to discuss this with, I highly recommend finding somebody to work with you specifically to manage your dental phobia.
I now have seen an excellent dentist for 15 years and I trust him to accommodate my needs. But it took a lot of initial short visits to get my comfort level to a level where I could cope with treatments. I approached it with the aim of desensitising myself to the environment and keeping the stakes low so I could manage when I needed complex treatments. I didn’t do this but you may consider just going to the waiting room for brief visits, and gradually spending an extra minute there every time (if this is feasible for you and you think it might work as a way to practise managing yourself).
What has helped me so far at appointments:
1. taking a notepad and pen to communicate with the dentist if I can’t speak due to the situation
2. finding mindfulness meditations that work for me to relieve anxiety in the lead-up
3. wearing comfortable clothing and asking for a cushion behind my neck and under the small of my back
4. reminding myself that the feelings and sensations will pass
5. focussing my attention on relaxing my hands, the back of my neck, and on breathing steadily
6. reminding myself of the big picture and that I am caring for myself even though it can be hard
I hope this may be helpful to you as you develop more skills for the future. It really enabled me to get through more dental treatments than I ever expected to need (thank you, genetics! and Dad’s family in particular!).
I am sooooooo lucky that my teeth aren’t in bad shape. my dad had been nagging me my entire young adulthood about going (he gave up when I was more or less a regular adult), which only made the anxiety worse, but it turns out his dad and brother both got the bad genetics and had awful trouble, so he was really worried about me compounding the problems by not going. I called him yesterday to tell him the dentist’s results and he was so audibly relieved. I hadn’t realized how much he was worrying!
I did a lot of therapy when I was a teen and in my early 20s for my anxiety and phobias, so I do have several techniques in place for dentist visits! They just don’t really solve the problem of being unable to bear the sensory stimulation or lying back. Sometimes it’s hard, too, to figure out if I’m having an autistic meltdown or an anxiety attack. Lots of times they’re very similar, but meltdowns are built up by overstimulation (sensory or emotional or social or) which can be aggravated by anxiety.
TBH my phobia has got as bad as it is because the last time I went, I was drugged to the nines with valium and did everything I could to manage the anxiety, and it was still horrible. I wanted to scream and fight but I couldn’t because I was such a zombie it was like I was packed in tight cotton and in dreamland, and I could only cry. I had done everything in your list, except the notepad.
(Yesterday was just X-Rays and a visual inspection because we are doing baby steps, and I wanted to give myself the absolute least scary first visit. Next will be a light cleaning, and if that goes well, we’ll fix a chipped tooth where the filling is cracked and the sharp edge bothers me. I actually did pretty well as long as I wasn’t reclined in the chair, once the initial panic (which was induced by misophonia, so at least in part it was a meltdown) subsided).
Thank you for chiming in with advice! 🙂
Nicole, what do you have against West Coasters? Why are you making us wake up at 6 am to get totes? Wah wah whine.
(jk, ilu, thanks for being amazing and doing this for us)
Hello Toasties. <3 Tell me something that’s been making you happy lately in these trying times?/something you’re looking forward to/something cool you did?
I’ll start! There was a post on here not too long ago about how to tell if someone is flirting with you that felt very relevant to my life, in a Mallory-are-you-spying-on-me sort of way, which finally got me to make an account and comment after a long time of lurking. Not too long after it turned out that the guy in question really was flirting with me! So then we went on a date (to catch the very last screening of The Force Awakens, hell yeah) and have been going out since. It’s taking me some time to get used to being in a relationship, but it’s also making me really, really happy. And now I will always remember that one flirting post along all my other favourite toast moments.
I am going to be in New York (sadly only for two days) for a business trip on July 12th-13th. I love, love, love the city in a total and completely touristy, American, media-consuming way and i don’t care. (gritty! accents! meat-processing! big dreams! bright lights! the Fitzgeralds! old buildings! Central Park! Broad City! leaves! YELLOW TAXIS! gaaahhh).
I attended this event last year, too, and ended up reading all of the The Goldfinch over 36 hours, and walked home from dinner one night in the warm summer rain with the lights reflecting off the street puddles and it was a very FEELINGS-full trip.
I will be working all day, but i’m looking forward to spending the few hours in the evenings just exploring and experiencing. (also any NY Toasties, feel free to recommend places! I’ll be in the Chelsea/Hell’s Kitchen area mostly. I’ll also post to the NY Slack channel)
That sounds wonderful! I hope you have the best time.
Does anyone else have public figures who represent everything you despise but who you also can’t help but sincerely admire in one very small and specific way?
Mine is Theresa May. I am 100% against all her politics and everything she stands for and everything she wants to do with the country, but whenever I see a photo of her, I cannot help but admire her sense of style and how she makes it work for her. She dresses so well!
Maybe John Boehner? His politics are terrible (although they could be worse) but I have a couple of friends in the restaurant biz here in DC who say that he is hands down the best customer, that he loves wait staff and always tries to talk to them and share stories about his own experiences in the restaurant industry. I also like his recently-cultivated image as a bitter, chain-smoking sad sack.
I’ll second John Boehner in his post-politics incarnation. Remember earlier in the year when he was at Stanford and ripped Ted Cruz? The political reporters in DC were all, yeah, that’s the Boehner we knew; after hours the guy would pour himself a whiskey, light a cigarette and have long off-the-record conversations when he’d just let FLY about anyone and everything.
I like that John Boehner acknowledges having emotions other than anger. Seriously, that is not nothing for a man raised in the US in his generation.
Margaret Thatcher. Awesome pioneer for women in politics. But her politics. Oy!
Megyn Kelly for that one time she schooled Karl Rove on Obama winning the 2012 election.
Condi Rice. I love everything she’s done except her work from 2001-2009 (I also hate but understand that shes in a glass closet)
Genre fiction time- is anyone voting for the Hugos that has strong feelings about what deserves a win? And is anyone going to the Romance Writers of America conference in San Diego next month? I’m going for work and it would be amazing to meet Toasties there!
In other news I’m on desk and it’s toddler storytime. Everyone is screaming, I got 4 hours too little sleep because I stayed up playing Borderlands, and my coworker just offered to do a Starbucks run for me so I am in actual tears.
Chicago Toasties! If you are not part of the Facebook group and do not know, we are having a Toast Wake at Parts & Labor off of the Logan Square Blue Line at 6 pm Friday. Please come! We’ll stake a claim on the back patio and eat fries and yell/cry/make friends.
Anyone want to help me sift through some complicated feelings about the Book of Ruth?
So when I last read it (somewhere between 5 and 10 years ago) I remember it seemed like this wonderful oasis of human companionship sandwiched in between the Book of Judges and the 1 Samuel, which (while they have their moments) are both massively violent, massively removed from my own experience, very focused on men and men’s POV, and not always rich in mutualistic human relationships. And I remember it being this wonderful breath of fresh air that seemed so down-to-earth and personal and beautiful and (relatively) nurturing.
Except, I’m reading it now having grown older and hopefully wiser, and also on its own rather than immediately after finishing Judges and getting smacked in the face with the story of the Levite’s Concubine (and while bracing myself for the gorefest that is 1 and 2 Samuel). And also a lot slower and more carefully.
And it kinda sorta seems a lot like it could be subtitled “or, the Best Case Scenario for Ancient Near Eastern Sex Work.” Naomi and Ruth are basically starving, so Naomi tells Ruth to put the moves on the local headman and see what happens, and she does, and he gives her some food but leaves secretly because he doesn’t want anyone to see they were together, and then decides he’ll marry her through legal shenanigans even though he doesn’t technically have to, yay the end.
Also Ruth is mostly passive except for the “where you go I will go” speech, and Naomi’s actions towards Ruth seem to be mainly to try to reject her, and when that doesn’t work use her as leverage to get them out of poverty. Which makes the “mutualistic human relationship” thing kinda shaky.
And it’s not like I didn’t know that it was the product of an extremely patriarchal culture, but I still do have a great deal of affection for the story (in a way I don’t for, say, the courtship of Rachel), and I feel like I’m almost at the point of being able to say something coherent about it, but I’m not quite there so here I am on the open thread trying to work through my incoherence.
I feel like if I were to file Ruth under “ways living in the ANE sucked” that would be throwing out some really important things that ought not be thrown out. And I still feel very emotionally close to the story, and I don’t want to lose that. But I also don’t want to diminish the massive screwed-upness of the society that drives the story, and I feel like the distance necessary to analyze and acknowledge said screwed-upness is at odds with the emotional closeness I want to have with the story and the characters in it.
…and reading that, that sounds just *terribly* naive and like I’m a tiny high schooler who is just discovering that C. S. Lewis might possibly be somewhat sexist, gasp!, as opposed to a 30-something who majored in literature and has worked through this routine with umpteen dozen other works of literature, not to mention a Toast regular who has probably read umpteen dozen articles/comments working through the exact same (or very similar) thing. And I’m not sure why working through this routine with Ruth would be different from working through it with Austen, or Tolkien, or Canterbury Tales, or whatever else.
I’m not even sure if I actually even have a question that needs answering, or if it’s just a matter of letting contradictory feelings and viewpoints settle inside me until I decide that I’m ok with both of them without really knowing how or why. But even so, I would kinda like to talk about it, so would anyone else like to talk about it?
(also I will be going to work immediately after posting this so it’ll take me a while to reply, but I will reply!)
I always liked that the Book of Ruth had a female hero and title character, and she was the one who saved her family (even though by then her family was just two people, herself and Naomi). But she didn’t just wait around for a man to come along, even though that was what she needed in that patriarchical society – she made a plan and went out and cotched one. She seems so smart and clever, and I also just liked that she and Naomi chose to cling together. And also she was a Gentile, but she still gets to be an ancestor of Jesus and gets mentioned by name in his genealogy. We hardly ever get to hear stories about unmarried women doing anything in the Bible, so I’m a fan of her adventurous life. Plus just moving to a new country where she didn’t know anyone must have been so scary! She was brave, and she must have loved Naomi very much.
True! It’s a good point that Ruth doesn’t just go along with the default kinship option. Her husband dies, and Naomi says (or implies, anyway) “go back to your family, they’ll take care of you” and Ruth’s answer seems to be: “being taken care of comes second, staying with you is more important.” Then in Judah they manage to finagle a way to stay together but not be homeless and starving.
I also wonder if my lack of understanding of Jewish Law makes me less able to appreciate Ruth/Naomi’s cleverness. When I read the last bit, I just sort of hear “buzz buzz, something about land and kinship ties,” and then Ruth marries Boaz. Which is probably something I should remedy, since in context it seems very intentional and specific in a way I don’t yet fully appreciate. It’s not a fairy godmother waving her wand and saying “Bibidi Babidi Boo,”, it’s a legal maneuver based on pre-existing texts.
And also, I guess reading it in isolation has its downsides too: it’s easy to forget what a big freaking deal it is that Ruth was a Moabite (or, from Ruth’s perspective, that everyone else in the story was an Israelite) when I didn’t come fresh from reading a whole book of Moabites and Israelites stabbing each other over and over.
I think probably part of my problem re: the analytical distance vs. emotional closeness thing was that I wasn’t diving quite deep enough. I need to be able to analyze the story as a First Temple-era Israelite, as well as a modern person, and code-switch fluently enough that I can appreciate it from both perspectives—for example (as you point out) appreciating how big a deal it is that women are both the subjects and the agents of the story. Which I guess is probably the big difference for me between Ruth and Chaucer: I have sufficient background knowledge in medieval Britain to do that already without really thinking about, but my background knowledge of ancient Israel is much more patchy, so I keep filling things in with my modern expectations.
Thanks!
I forget the legal buzz buzz too, but I remember there was a more eligible male relative who should have been first in line to marry her, but she and Naomi liked Boaz better so they set their caps at him (like a Jane Austen young woman just coming to Bath or London for the first time with her chaperone!) And hooray, it worked! The other guy relinquished his claim. (I kind of want to see this as a regency movie now. Like how in “Persuasion” they wanted her to marry her distant cousin so the money could stay in the family, but he turned out to be a cad who was just using her to try to get the family title, and she gets to marry a nice guy with money of his own anyway. Not that Boaz’ mystery cousin was a cad, I don’t think we know anything about him except that he was more directly in line but said no thanks, you go ahead. But I feel like it was that sort of weird Jane Austen-ish legalese with the “kinsman redeemer” who marries her so she’s able to regain her fortune and standing in society and the family tree. And later, Jesus is compared to a kinsman redeemer too, in that he redeems us to good standing as family members in God’s eyes.
And yes, pretty much the WHOLE Old Testament is about Israel being God’s chosen people, so a Moabite woman was totally an outsider. She was just so brave to go with Naomi. Like… a Polish widow following her English mother-in-law to go live in England now after Brexit.
I grew up with Ruth’s story in Sunday school and children’s books (and my fabulous storytelling mom) from my earliest age, so that’s where I learned these things, even though it didn’t all sink in until I was older, especially just how scary and uncertain her future must have seemed as a young foreign widow with NOBODY to count on except her weepy mother-in-law, and God.
(Also, I never heard about any premarital sex connotations until adulthood – usually the Bible doesn’t mince words when people have sex, so her sleeping at his feet just always seemed to me just that, sleeping at his feet, I dunno? Usually the Bible also points out the badness of extramarital sex, so I’m not convinced sex was involved. It would have been so incredibly scandalous.
Edit: And leaving to make sure no one saw them together helps protect her reputation as a virtuous woman too, especially if she wants a shot at marrying that other guy.)
Try thinking of it as Chaucerian sort of medieval British stuff. “My sons went on the Crusades and died, but not before they married two Jewish wives!” Gasp! Here comes Naomi home to Canterbury with her shocking Jewish daughter (who has converted to Christianity but still looks dark and foreign, but beautiful.) But they’re both as poor as paupers, and who would want to marry her, even if she’s beautiful? They have to live off of alms from the church, but somehow Ruth works hard and manages to support them both and earns a reputation as a good woman. (Now I want to see this as a “Pillars of the Earth” story, like the poor young woman who loses her family and fortune but starts a wool business and eventually becomes a wealthy merchant.)
Haha I just remembered I used to kind of wish my name was Ruth.
Toasts, I have been courting a mama cat and associated flock of kittens I found in my building’s back yard and let me tell you, they are adorable.
Just
Too
Sweet.
Eventually I want to cotch the whole family and keep as many as my lease will allow (ONE ;_____;) but they are Very Skittish and can only be lured with free food. I will keep moving the food closer to me until one day they are eating out of my very arms and then I shall whisk them away. Yesterday I was able to entice several of the kittens into a game of catch-the-flower so hopefully this will be SOON.
Does the orca kitten have a short tail?! GIVE MEEEEEEEEEEE
omg ORCA KITTEN <3____<3 I thought it looked mostly like a tiny cow but you’re right.
(its tail is normal length as far as I can tell)
You are doing Good Work. Thank you.
*places hand on heart* I dearly HOPE so. These kitties deserve so many good homes.
omg the tabby with the white ruff. I wants it precious.
On no basis other than my own whims I have assigned her a gender and decided her name is B’Elanna. She is a sweetie pie and very brave, also has the softest ears. This is probably not helpful, sorry /o/
HOW DID YOU KNOW WHAT I PLAN TO NAME MY NEXT CAT??? B’Elanna Purres forever!
*a flock of kittens* <3
Good present ideas for a smart, sensitive ten year old you do not know well at all (logistics) but is family and of whom you are fond at a distance and would like to impress/make happy/create positive memories/etc?
I have to mail a package for her out this week by Friday so I am haunting Amazon and desperately pretending I will have Open Threads and all of you forever (who cries and shops online? What an absurd accusation. My desk was covered in tears before I got here.).
This t-shirt: http://otherwild.com/products/the-future-is-femal…
And this book: https://www.amazon.ca/DAulaires-Greek-Myths-Ingri…
Seconding D’aulaire’s, although I was a bit younger when I read it (maybe 7 instead of 10). That thing got me through my entire core curriculum at Columbia, no joke.
Ursula Vernon’s Harriet Hamsterbone books! There are two out now and they are the most delightfully feminist adventure books ever. I gave the first to a young friend and she loved it so passionately she refused to finish reading it (thankfully, the second one came out soon thereafter so I could give it to her as well).
Legos? You can never have too many Legs. I mean Legos. You can definitely have too many legs.
I have successfully wrung many monies out of the construction company that put up scaffolding without permission in my yard! I stood my ground against these manly interlopers and now have tote money to boot! I feel good!
Whoa, how did you manage that? The most I would probably ever think to ask for is No More Scaffolding In My Yard so congrats on your new tote money \o/
A second chance at Toast totes hallelujah! (I am lazy/strapped for cash and missed out the first time.)
In other news, I’m still thinking about Ravenclaw Idris Elba. The date was like a week ago and I can’t see him because we’re going to be on opposite sides of the country for a month. Is this a normal dating reaction? Have not dated much in past decade. Please advise.
(Also, any Toast wakes/meetups/Toasties in general in the VA Tidewater region?)
Late post thanks to work busyness in the AM, but I wanted to share this somewhere.
I do healthy relationship & sexuality education for folks with developmental and intellectual disabilities. Our program has felt… tenuous in a lot ways for a lot of reasons since I started this job nearly 2 years ago. And we’ve had almost non-stop transitions in that time too (me coming on only a few months after my supervisor was switched into the program, learning curves, department reorgs, co-worker leaving, new co-worker hired & learning curve, adding responsibilities, office changes, clients in and out… it’s been a lot). And on top of all that, grant funding issues.
Anyway, some funding was cut on one grant, but it’s managed to turn into a opportunity for growth for our program and the direction we want to go (thanks to our new-ish, kickass director). Before that cut, we’d been essentially piloting a version of our program in one of the city’s public schools. It went well, despite some hiccups that we’re ironing out for the future. And now, magically/thank you hard work, we’re thisclose to a contract with the public school system! And I’m so excited! We had a meeting with a coordinator from the schools yesterday and discussed how the contract/MOU will get approved, how we’d like to structure our groups and time with the schools once the new school year hits, trainings we can offer…
I just, this is the most hopeful I’ve felt about our program continuing on since I started. I’ve been struggling with my desire to stay in this position, and now I feel like I have something to stay for. I get to do my groups, teach much needed topics, and can finally see a year where we reach our numbers/stats. This is huge. So huge. I feel like I want to cry half the time and beam sunshine out of my ass the other half.
Anyway, that was more than I planned on writing. But I’m so much more optimistic about my job than I was before and I’m so happy about that.
Wow, that’s excellent! A contract with the school system should be great for the non-profit’s stability, at least for the year. We got a contract for tours and it has made a world of difference for budget worries (vs “will we have enough schools next month?” when they had to take their own initiative to get tours on an individual school basis).
I’m really glad you’re feeling so much better about your job!
The nice thing is that our program is part of a larger agency… It’s just funded by grants from outside that agency. So heck yes on moving towards more stability with the program! The contract (actually a memo of understanding/MOU) isn’t for money, but it will definitely help us show that we can hit or exceed our target numbers with stable partnerships, so we can continue getting funding OR get better funding in the future.
Budget worries going away, for at least a while, is huge. I’m glad you got your contract!
As a few people have commented about struggling to find old posts, I have created a new sheet in the Toast connections spreadsheet – https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_26MiL9WN… – listing them, with a column for title, date, author, category, series and URL. I am doing it manually, as a) I do not know how to do it any other way and b) it means I get to revisit great old posts I have forgotten. If anyone wants to join in, feel free!
Check the Link Roundup yesterday! Folks were talking about automating this with a script!
I am definitely planning to attempt to do this by non-manual methods, probably on Friday, so if you want to wait for that then it may save you some work.
Excellent! I’ll keep an eye out and delete my thing if it becomes redundant, and keep going with it if automated stuff doesn’t work out.
Toasts, I’ve been a lurker for a while, and when I heard the site was closing I was heartbroken. I wasn’t going to make an account to comment since I could only know all of you for so little, but the thought of ending this week without saying “Hi, you have all meant so much to me and I just want to let you know” was heartbreaking, so here I am, saying thanks for being such a great community with such great stories to share.
Toasties, I was late because I was working. I hope someone will be around to see this, if not now then perhaps in the dark and empty days After The Toast. I am in need of your finest dating advice.
I’ve never… dated. I was in a series of high-school relationships, and then a committed long-term relationship for all of college, and that relationship ended a few months ago. Finding a life partner is important to me as an eventual thing, and I’m about to move to a new place, so this is probably a good time to try dating, right?
Except that I have NO idea how to do that. I’m also a socially-awkward introvert, so the idea of meeting some unknown person on one of my precious days off when I could be alone with my laptop is very unappealing. I’ve tried dating apps but they make me have panic attacks.
What has worked for you?
Possibly not helpful for you, but what worked for me was deciding that I actually really like being alone and don’t want to give up my happy solitude. I prefer ALL my precious days being alone with my computer. So I guess my only advice is: don’t worry about it and just enjoy life in your new place. Maybe dating will happen, maybe not, but at least you know that being alone can be lovely.
(I think it was looking at online dating that pushed me over the edge, when I finally decided “I could be doing something FUN online rather than reading all these stupid profiles!” I never went on a date with any of those online dudes because they were SO BORING and stupid. And I realized I would rather spend my whole life alone than look at one more stupid profile where the guy didn’t even have a favorite book because he doesn’t read books.)
Thank you for replying!
I guess that’s probably a good point. IDK, I don’t really like being alone, and I’d like to have someone to just be with, and also sex, and stuff, but on the other hand there are relatively few people in the world I like more than I like being able to just do what I want, and then only for limited amounts of time.
And yeah the online dudes are SO BORING and the thought of having to SHAVE MY LEGS to talk to one of them in real life is like viscerally repulsive when I could be watching Jane the Virgin with no bra on by myself at home.
Haha yes! Having to shave your legs, UGH. Though I will say, the one time I did sort of date a guy (who I met at church and liked pretty well), I would get so excited and happy to go hang out that I didn’t even stop to put on makeup or anything, which was great. I just felt happy to be with him, and didn’t feel the need to pretty myself up. (But he wasn’t touching my legs.) It was really novel, being excited to go hang out with someone (even on the spur of the moment!) instead of wanting to stay at home alone.
See I remember the “just happy to be with” feeling from the first half of my relationship with my ex, and that was so pleasant. I’d like to have that with somebody, but I don’t know how to find it. Sitting around waiting to encounter someone by chance doesn’t seem very empowering, but IDK what the alternative is that isn’t awful.
Now i’m just venting at the internet, I fear.
(PS, I am not sure I’ve ever really dated either. I’ve never had anything that I can definitely point to and say “There, I was dating then, and I was someone’s girlfriend.” So I hope you’ll get some advice from someone more helpful and experienced than me!)
I have never used dating sites or set out to be like, I will go on dates now! What has worked for me has been joining things. Since you’re moving, you’ll be looking for friend-friends as well as pants-feelings-friends, right? Music group, volunteering things, game meet ups? Then, even if you don’t meet someone you spark with, you have at least done something possibly interesting. Good luck!
Weirdly I’m not at all anxious about making friends-friends! I’ll be in a small grad school program and expect to make friends there, I’m already in touch with the Toastie meetups for New Area, I’ll join a faith community. I expect all that stuff to work out (as opposed to, when I moved for undergrad, being 100% convinced that I would Never Make A Friend and would Be Alone Forever) but not relationships with a romantic/sexual component.
I guess that says more about me than about the reality of any given situation!
Congrats on starting your grad program!
Thank you! I’m nervous/excited.
So, all the caveats, as I was using internet dating in a brief period of time where it was not the most awful thing that had ever existed and I didn’t use it very long at all, but here’s what worked for me:
Most people have dumb profiles. Making a profile that’s not dumb is hard! Many people are more interesting in person (exceptions including that one incredibly boring dude I went on a date with who totally did interesting things but failed to actually *be* interesting). If someone seems like they have potential, it’s much more efficient to keep the online chatting to a minimum and just meet up for coffee. You do not have to shave your legs for coffee (or ever, if you don’t feel like it!)
Even though most profiles are dumb, it helps to be yourself as hard as possible in yours. My husband wound up messaging me because I wrote about my deep love affair with our local grocery store. The goal is not to meet lots of people, the goal is to meet the right people. You can block the wrong people right away without guilt. You don’t actually owe anyone anything.
It’s okay to limit the days/ times you go on dates. When I started dating I was super busy with, like, life stuff, so I only had two weekday evenings and one weekend day that I would even make available for dates- and I’d pretty much go on two a week, because I also like being home sometimes. Other things can be more important than dating. Early on, it’s probably good if there are things more important than dating, as it helps hold back the whole “imagine your entire life together with this person after one date” thing…
But, on the whole, I dated a total of three guys via online dating (one cool but not long term, one inexcusably boring, and my husband)- probably about the same time in my life as you are now. Sometimes it doesn’t take long! Which also means I can’t exactly claim long experience, just good results 😛
Since you’re in a new place, you might also try meetups or other sorts of “explore your new place” activities that have the potential for meeting people. I know our city does Nerd Night, which involves listening to interesting people talk about interesting things, with a starter course of speed dating if you want- I did the friend speed dating and it was fine! We didn’t click, but it was a perfectly tolerable way to spend a half hour, and then I listened to smart ladies talk about astrophysics, so the night would have been a win anyways.
I guess mostly it doesn’t have to be a big deal- with the right escape plan it’s a most an hour out of your life and hopefully a decent story (this is why boring dates are the worst- no story!) Good luck in your new place!
Thank you this is so helpful! I really appreciate you taking hte time to type all this out, especially the “limiting guilt” thing which is not my personal strength in this or any other area.
I am moving on Thursday and have just reached the panic point, which is ridiculous because I have only about two boxes left to pack and my clothes. But, I’m of course forgetting boxes full of stuff and what if it doesn’t fit in the truck what if the truck takes too long to pick up what if my movers cancel what if the move takes too long and I have to pay uhaul’s exorbitant late fee what if what if what if….oof, that feels better
I also cannot believe how many other people have such similar experiences!
I'm sorry that it's causing problems for you right now (although it also sounds like it might be a way of coping with tough circumstances – directionality is kind of hard to establish?). I couple years ago I went through a prolonged period of un/underemployment, and I think there was a noticeable uptick in my daydreaming for me, too. Talking about it with your therapist sounds like a good idea, for sure.
But no, not hideously embarassing! This conversation has been really productive for me. And even though my first instinct was to hide this from my wife, I went home yesterday and talked to her about it and she is only slightly alarmed, mostly just bewildered, I think. (At least she understands what's been happening the couple of times she's caught me running for no reason).
Mine is also very cool. I have tried to write it down, because it would make a great queer fantasy series, but that's always kind of killed the magic somehow.
Just in case there is no open thread tomorrow: I finally followed through on my promise to post the lyrics to “The Concrete Frog Murder,” co-authored with arrogantemu.
http://teenybuffalo.livejournal.com/410079.html for a full explanation; lyrics in reply.
Song: The Concrete Frog Murder
Words: Teenybuffalo and Arrogantemu
Tune: Trad (“Five Nights Drunk”)
While strolling out one evening
All to the church bazaar,
To see our friends and neighbors
And ask them how they are,
We met with Mrs. Johnson
A-sitting in the sun,
She said, “I’ve killed my husband,”
We said, “Pull the other one.”
CHORUS
“Oh no, you must believe me,
My husband Frank is dead,
I hit him with a concrete frog
And put him in the shed.”
When I went down the stylist’s
For a shampoo and set,
My hairdresser said to me,
“Have you heard the gossip yet?
Mrs. Johnson’s husband left her,
He must have gone away.”
“Well, that explains the tasteless joke
She made the other day.”
CHORUS
Mrs. Johnson lived all lonely
As the years went rolling on,
If you ask my opinion
She seemed glad that he was gone.
If Frank was ever mentioned
Down the pub on Friday night,
She’d always make the same sick joke–
We laughed to be polite.
CHORUS
Now amateur dramatics
Are a longtime love of mine,
I said, “I’m directing Hamlet,”
Mrs. Johnson said, “That’s fine,
I’ve got a skull that you can use,
It’s in the garden shed,
It belonged to my dead husband,”
“Not this again,” I said.
CHORUS
Now Mrs. Johnson passed away
Quite peacefully in bed,
We called a cleaning service
To clear out her garden shed,
They found a body in a tarp
All rolled up like a log,
And in the forehead was a dent
Shaped like a concrete frog.
FINAL CHORUS:
Whoever would have thought it?
She never even said!
That sweet old lady frogged poor Frank
And put him in the shed.